321: Bitcoin Ecosystem and Infinite Fleet

Buck: Welcome back to the show, everyone. Today, my guest on Wealth Formula podcast, I should say my guests on Wealth Formula podcast are Samson Mow and Chris Wood. Now, Samson and Chris, both have been on the show before. Samson, as you may recall, is a former chief strategy officer of Blockstream. He’s taken on a new role in a company he started called JAN3, which we will talk about. And Chris Wood is CEO of Pixelmatic. And for those of you who participated in an offering for a game that is known as Infinite Fleet, he is the guy sort of on the ground watching that every day. And of course, Samson is the CEO of that company as well. So we’re going to cover a lot today. We’re going to talk a little bit about bitcoin markets and future of that and then ultimately into this game. So, guys, welcome back to the show. It’s been a while, and I know you guys have been traveling the world in the meantime.

Samson: Yeah, thanks, Buck. It’s been great to come back again. It’s a routine now.

Buck: Yeah, it is good. It’s great. Because, Samson, I want to start with you. You’re kind of at ground zero a bitcoin as it develops. You left Blockstream and started JAN3. Do you want to just give us a quick review what Blockstream was doing and what you decided to leave there to do and what your vision is?

Samson: Right, so Blockstream is a bitcoin infrastructure company. It’s really focused on building up protocols, building out bitcoin side chains, the lightning network, things that expand bitcoin’s ability to do more and transact more and offer things like security tokens. I think the difference is for JAN3 we built ourselves as a bitcoin technology company. So our focus is more about getting adoption. So the plan is that we will work with governments, with companies that want to integrate bitcoin into their existing systems and infrastructure, and we want to also roll out our mobile wallet aqua into the hands of more people so that they can receive bitcoin, buy bitcoin, and transact. So it’s a bit of a different angle. We’re more about gaining adoption and mass adoption, nation state adoption, whereas Block Stream is more about infrastructure and development of the underlying protocols.

Buck: Talk a little bit about that because I follow you on Facebook and all that, and I’m seeing you around the world near volcanoes with governments. You want to tell us a little bit about what you’ve been up to specifically?

Samson: Sure. So I guess a lot of my work is focused around El Salvador. So last year, El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender, as you remember, and that caused a big stir around the world. And this year, actually, the Central African Republic made it legal tender as well. So we’re seeing more and more nation states adopt it, as well as cities and autonomous regions like Madeira, Prospera, and plenty more down the road. But there’s this wave of nation stated option kicking off. But while I was at Blockchain, I helped the seller design a bitcoin bond. So it is essentially a bond offering with a bitcoin component. So the plan is to raise $1 billion, and it will be tokenized on the liquid side chain so that it’s really tradable and you can custom it yourself in your mobile phone. But the difference here with the normal bond aside from the tokenization model is that there is half of the bond raised going into bitcoin, buying bitcoin on the market. So they’ll have 500 million in cash, which they will deploy for mining operations and expanding their power generation facilities, expanding their geothermal plants, and then half of it is buying bitcoin. Now, after a five year mark, they’re going to start selling off that bitcoin. They’ll first recoup their initial 500 million investment, but then they’ll start selling it month by month or quarter by quarter and sharing that upside with the investors in the bond. So it’s a very novel instrument, and hopefully more and more countries will start to look at that model for financing. But, yeah, that’s something. I worked with them before, and I’m still doing a lot of advisory to the government of alcohol or when they have requests or questions about bitcoin.

Buck: Are the countries that are interested right now primarily those that have some issues of instability with their own currency?

Samson: I would say it has to do with more, to do with dollarization. So osavo is dollarized, right? They used to have their own currency called the colon, but then that was actually phased out, I think legally still exists, but they don’t use it anymore. And now they have US. Dollars and bitcoin as eagle tender in Africa. For the central African republic, they are using the colonial Swiss franc, the CFA franc. So that’s like a fiat currency created from France to effectively control their colonies previously. And unfortunately, it’s still a legacy that’s still in play in Africa. So they are also trying to extract themselves from that system and looking to adopt a bitcoin standard. But like you’re saying, it’s probably countries that are dollarized or using someone else’s money. And that is a problem for them because they suffer from inflation. There’s no benefit. So typically the money supply is inflated, say, in the US. And there’s infrastructure projects, there’s money going around. But for them, they’re not seeing that money, but they’re suffering from the inflated supply because their purchasing power is going down. So it makes sense for these countries to try to go onto a bitcoin standard, onto a money that is not controlled by anyone and is apolitical.

Buck: When you look at Ecuador in particular, they obviously made a big move last year, as you mentioned. How does that look on the ground right now? Like day to day transactions changed? Are people walking around exchanging bitcoin or a bitcoin derivative? Or how is that working right now? Or is that really just in its infancy?

Samson: I would say it’s still rolling out. So they’ve launched their achievable wallet. That’s their government custodial wallet. It supports bitcoin and lightning transfers. They’ve got a lot of installs, but I don’t see the daily usage at a high level yet. It’s still more or less in the early phases of adoption. And I think that’s normal because you can’t just overnight flip the switch and have a country of 6 million people using bitcoin. So there’s going to be a gradual ramp up. But you do see a lot of businesses supporting bitcoin, accepting bitcoin for payments. And I think the biggest boon has been to the economy. So they’ve seen a massive uptick in tourism and people going to El Salvador. A lot of people in my circles in the bitcoin industry and crypto industry, they made the pilgrimage to El Salvador to see elvante, to see what’s going on there. And I think their tourism numbers are up like 30, 40% this year.

Buck: Sort of like the new Puerto Rico or something, except the benefit of having some adoption. As you work with these countries, what is like the response? I don’t know if there’s a pushback or whatever from other countries around the world that are clearly not interested right now in having bitcoin play any significant legitimized role in their economies. Are you seeing anything like that? Are you experiencing anything like that? Or are you just not really in that loop?

Samson: Well, I guess the biggest opposition to bitcoin adoption, it seems to be the IMF. They definitely don’t like that countries are trying to move off the dollar standard. And I think they’ve incentivized Argentina to not adopt bitcoin. So they’ve made some loans contingent upon rejection of bitcoin as the money and adopting like a central bank, digital currency or whatnot. But there is pressure and there is a lot of political force being deployed to make sure that people don’t adopt bitcoin.

Buck: Do you feel like right now, if you compare where bitcoin was like, I don’t know, 2017, obviously, like the last time everybody was talking about bitcoin when your barber was talking about bitcoin compared to now development in terms of its use, can you talk like, where we’ve come during that period of time?

Samson: Well, I would say we’ve come a long way and the ecosystem has developed a lot since then. And I think it mostly has to do with layer two tech, like lightning and like liquid. So we’re seeing adoption of both of these. There are two technologies accelerate very fast. So lightning I think, has about 4000 bitcoin locked into it and that means they’re using these bitcoins for payments and whatnot. The liquid ecosystem, I think, has 3000 something bitcoin locked in, and that’s for trading and arbitrage and moving funds between exchanges, etcetera. As well as stable coins issued on liquid as well. But I’d say overall we’re in a very different place than we were in 20 17, 20 18. We’re at the cusp of nation state adoption, so we had a number of cities and autonomous regions start to express interest in adopting it or making it legal tender. And then we have two countries now, and possibly more along the way. If you’re paying attention to the politics in Latin America, there’s more and more politicians, like potential presidential candidates standing up and saying that’s part of my platform. And even in Canada we have Pierre Pollyv, he’s running for leadership of the Conservative Party. And part of his platform is also being accepting of bitcoin and trying to push bitcoin as a standard for money. I would say we’re in a pretty good place. And we also have Michael Sailor. Now, he’s the best proponent we could have asked for. And I would expect there will be more Michael Sailors to come.

Buck: Before we move on from bitcoin. Just to comment, obviously we had a big bull run. Maybe we’re still in a bull run, I don’t know. And maybe we’re just flatlining for a little bit. But I know the price of it. When you have a vision like you have is almost sort of pointless to talk about. But what do you think is going on? Is it just natural volatility? There is this idea, or there was this idea from bitcoin purist before, that somehow bitcoin would be immune to the other markets, but it really doesn’t seem like it has been so far. It sort of has tracked in a more volatile way some of the tech equity markets. Do you think that just continues to be a transitional volatility that tracks tech rather than something bigger than that?

Samson: Well, yeah, there’s lots to unpack in that question, but let’s address the volatility first. I would say volatility is important. Volatility is the lifeblood of markets, right? Things should go up and down if equal or trading. And bitcoin trades twenty four seven and it’s borderless. So everyone is accessing the bitcoin market and that leads to what people like or dislike, which is volatility. For example, yesterday or today, depending on what time zone you’re in. But we had a drop, we were at 31,500 and then we dropped really suddenly to under 30,000. And the cause for that, I believe, was actually some ethereum holder dumping 100,000 ether. And because all these markets are linked together, there are eastern BTC trading pairs, it can impact other markets. But now, of course, we’ve rebounded right back up because that has nothing to do with bitcoin. It was just the markets evening out the spread. But the part about the tech stock behavior of bitcoin has a lot to do with the fact that there’s a lot of Wall Street money in bitcoin right now. So Michael Sailor has broken this down before and I think his explanation is the best. There are traders, there’s Wall Street players, and then there are huddlers. So the hoddlers are just buying and stacking. Ideally they’re taking their coins off of the exchange. So that means the price action right now is largely driven not by hodlers, but by the people that are actively trading it. And a large chunk of that is Wall Street. So if their thesis is bitcoin as a tech stock, then we’ll track like a tech stock, or will track like a risk on asset. But bitcoin is not a risk on asset, it’s a risk off asset. And if you actually zoom out of it and look at the correlation, if you map out the bitcoin price to stocks and equities, actually it goes up. So bitcoin is not correlated. It’s correlated in short time frames quite tightly, but on a longer time horizon, like years, it actually is not correlated. Bitcoin is always going up, and I think we’ll see that over some time because that segment of the bitcoin ecosystem, the hoddlers, they’re taking more and more coins off exchange. So there is actually not that many bitcoin on exchanges now. So when the supply dries up, and we’re getting close to the next having next year, where the supply of bitcoin will have again from six point 25 to half of that, then we’re going to see a massive supply shock, and that could drive the price even higher. But I don’t believe we’re in a bear market. I think we’re sort of in this weird sideways market now. And it has a lot to do with black swan events like war, all these crazy things that we’re not really expecting. But the trend for bitcoin is to go up just because it’s been designed to go up. It’s been designed to absorb all the value in the world. So the destiny is for bitcoin to keep appreciating.

Buck: Samson is the CEO of Pixelmatic, and as I mentioned, Chris, who’s also on chris, we haven’t had a chance to hear from you, the COO pixel matic. So I want to kind of talk a little bit about why don’t you start with this, because some people, the audience, is constantly growing here and may not know exactly what infinite fleet is, what the idea was and when it all started. And why don’t you start with that?

Chris: Sounds great. Well, yeah, it’s good to be back on, but it’s always good to chat with you. Yeah. So infinite fleet is what we call a massively multiplayer online game, MMO. So that means hundreds of thousands of players playing together. These are like second lives that people immerse themselves in

Buck: Like fortnite. Right? Isn’t that like the most that everybody knows?

Chris: Right. That’s certainly one of the big ones, for sure, because that really rocked the gaming industry. They made I think it was close to 3 billion in their first year or something. It was a really incredible phenomenon. And the games industry is just growing at an unbelievable rate. Right. In 2021, I believe it was 190,000,000,000, 98 billion, and in 2007 it’s projected to hit 340. So it’s really just an incredible growth market because when I was a kid, being a gamer was kind of a quote unquote nerdy thing. And now it’s mainstream. It’s bigger than movies and music combined. It’s just an incredible industry. But to go back specifically to infinite fleet, so we are, like I say, an MMO game. Hundreds of thousands of players playing together. You are the commander of a fleet. So if you’re thinking like Star Trek, you’re essentially a card going out into the galaxy, exploring, fighting these Atrox aliens that are threatening humanity and players, it’s a very community driven game. Players play together, they cooperate, they build space stations, they colonize planets, they pool their resources to fight the enemy in a big sort of cooperative sandbox. So it’s a very, as I say, immersive game where players can really live the second life online, which is very common. I know you’ve got kids book, I don’t know if they play games, but it’s very common for young folks to really jump into these kind of virtual environments.

Buck: Infinite Fleet specifically remind people what the premise of this game was.

Chris: Yes, the idea for us with Infinite Fleet was, as I say, to make something really massive that players could jump into. So they’re a commander of in the USF the United Seoul Federation, they fight with other players to attack the Atrox aliens. And the thing that makes it quite unique, well, there’s a few things that we’re innovating here, really, but one thing that’s quite interesting is that we also have this crypto tow, this currency that goes through the game as well. So when you play infinitely, when you take part in the special events like these big events, the players that really interact and really take part, they earn a reward of INF currency. Now, INF currency actually isn’t all that different from a lot of currencies that are in other games. Like you mentioned, Fortnite, right? They have V books, world of Warcraft has just gold. There’s a whole bunch of these massive games that have economies running through them, essentially. But the difference is that our currency has possibilities. So as a cryptocurrency, you can actually take that onto other platforms. And also the spaceships in our game are NFTs. So NFT is obviously this big. There’s been a real buzzword recently. There’s a lot of interesting things going on there, whether you love it or hate it. But for us, the NFC allows for an open market of trading digital goods so players can take them out of the game and trade them wherever they like. So this really opens a lot of opportunity for players.

Buck: So one of the things just for some of us Gen X reminds me of when you used to go the old fashioned arcade and then you have to put your dollar into get your four tokens out, and then you use those four tokens, but you could only use them at that arcade. It’s not like you could go to another arcade. And this is a situation where you’re saying, well, hey, those tokens might be worth something somewhere else as well. So if you’re earning some tokens, you don’t have to use them just at this arcade. You can actually trade them, they have value. Is that a fair comparison?

Chris: Yes, so a lot of players, they spend a lot of time in these games. Some people put literally thousands of hours, right, building customizing these avatars, these spaceships and things. And so the idea is that you could kind of liquidate that value, that time that you’ve put in, and then take it onto another platform, take it to another game, or trade it with some other digital assets. So for us, for me and Samson both, when we’re very free market people, we believe in this very much, and we believe that for the players, they should be able to extract that value. They should be able to take the time and effort that they put in and then apply that into other platforms too.

Buck: Yeah, sure. And then from the standpoint of those who are investors in the background, I’ll give on this real quick, is that Chris and Samson actually, initially I had been introduced to Samson when they were doing the initial, I guess the friends and family round, mutual friend, and I was like, well, hey, I’m interested, but hey, I have this group, which is our investor club, and we got an opportunity to be in on that initial round. I think it was like twenty five cents a token, and then there was a second round. Fifty cents a token. At any rate, by the way, for those of you wondering, I’m talking about this is a regd 506 C, so I can speak openly about this. I’m not breaking any rules, I promise. We’ve done two rounds through our group and kind of maybe help us understand from the investor side, how do investors make money in this game.

Samson: Okay, maybe I’ll do this one, Chris.

Buck: I should point out that the game is not live yet either. Right? So Beta is coming out like a month.

Samson: Well, it was live. Alpha was live for Alpha six months or something like that. But we just shut down Alpha recently in preparation for Beta, which is end of July, july 27 or 28th. Which one was it, Chris? July july 28. Okay, 28th. Yeah, the game was live. It is playable unlike a lot of the other blockchain games going back to the token. It is a security token, and there is a profit share of 20% for the holders of the token. So if the game makes money, then all the holders essentially get an upside too. But we are a little bit different than all the projects that you probably see in the space. Like there’s tons of blockchain or cryptocurrency games. For us, the capital raise was always meant to be firewalled from the game. So you do have similar types of projects where they’re selling their utility token and it could be a security but not registered. But we didn’t want to deal with that. So the EXO token is completely a security. It’s registered in Europe. It’s done through a Luxembourg Securitization vehicle, much like the BMN and the game part when Chris was talking about NFCs for the ships and the game currency as a crypto asset, that is all done on the liquid side chain. Now the ships are sold, but the game currency is not, it is earned. So we’re just trying to create a mechanism for players to freely trade. So because both assets are issued on the liquid side chain, players can do an atomic swap. And what that means is they can do a trade where there’s no counterparty risk. So someone does not need to send the ship first you and then you send the money later or the infl later. It happens all at once or none at all. So the goal here was to empower the players and let them freely trade and not get scammed. Because there’s a lot of secondary markets in the game industry where people do get scammed, right? They go and try to sell something and buy something and they don’t get the item. But we’re trying to use the technology to improve that experience and also make it so that we’re not a bottleneck to it. Because when you earn your game currency in Infinite Fleet, it actually goes through a wallet that is created for you when you install the game. So it’s non custodial we don’t actually have access to your INF currency, unlike World Warcraft where it’s in their database. Right? And I think this is really important because our whole kind of line of thinking is that we want to empower the players. A lot of games, they don’t want secondary markets to exist, they don’t want players to trade up items and whatnot. But our thinking is you invest the time to make that ship or level up that ship, you should be able to do whatever you want with this ship. So it’s kind of the east of the company and the thinking, it’s more like bitcoin free market and free trade.

Buck: So from the investor side, there’s a dividend or a profit share, so to speak. And then there’s also the value of the security token itself. As it gains value, you gain value as sort of capital appreciation on that end as well. Is that right?

Samson: Yes. Chris, do you want to talk about the publishing model?

Chris: Yeah. So Infinite Fleet in the first place, it’s really the first step in a kind of a long plan. So Exhortion is our publisher, which is publishing Infinite Fleet. Pixelmatic is the developer and we have a development contract between the companies, essentially. So the long term plan for Exorbitant is for us to actually be publishing a wide range of games that kind of share the ethos that we were speaking about, this free market, this empowering the players method. So as we continue to onboard other developers, other games on our platform, of course the EXO holders will also get dividend from that revenue as well. So all the revenues that come from the Exordium publisher will be part of that dividend. And also in terms of Xwing as well, it’s not just that, but there’s also capital rights upon liquidation as well. So if there is an M and A, if we do get bought out or something like that, that does equally go to all the EXO holders. So we are building a publishing platform. We also intend to acquire some licenses for other games too and really drive it. We’ve been developing some products for Exodus at the moment. We are developing something called Exodium Pay for example, which is going to be giving the opportunity for purchase players to use a wide variety of payment methods for Bitcoin and others to buy digital items and things across the platform of any game that’s published from that.

Buck: What was the experience of the Alpha launch? What kind of feedback did you get? What kinds of interest did you get from that?

Chris: Sure, well at the time of the Alpha launch and just before actually, just to clarify, our NFC technology hasn’t actually been rolled out yet, but the players bought the ships, they loved the ships that we were selling. They’re really cool, they’ve got this kind of 80s style, really poor and those nostalgia strings and our community of players have been very supportive indeed throughout what we have this community on a platform called Discord, they’re always talking about the game and we had a very positive feedback on that because as Samson was touching on before, a lot of the blockchain games, if you go on Google and just type in blockchain game or something like that, you’ll see these early naughties kind of HTML really lame games. But we’ve got this incredible development team.

Buck: Talk a little bit about that because I think that all is really important when we always talk about the reason I ultimately invested in one of those rounds and one of the reasons I did it is because the team right? So talk about that team because I think that’s important.

Chris: No problem at all. Well, first, just Samson here, obviously, as he’s a bitcoin luminary, but previously he was Ex Ubisoft, right? So Samson was in a very high position in one of the largest video gaming companies in the world and along with our two directors, Steve and Keith are pretty much responsible for our Ubisoft’s East Asian success publishing games like Smurfs and Co. Which I think was one of the biggest Facebook games that Ubisoft had launched. Also our Chief Creative Officer, Jason, he was previously the senior Gameplay Designer at Relic, which is a large studio which developed games such as Age of Empires Four, which is a massive IP in the industry. And he also worked on Company of Heroes, which is the highest critically acclaimed game on Metacritic for strategy in the strategy genre that we’re in. So in terms of the design, we’ve got great hands on the wheel there and also the art style as well. Like I said, we’ve got this really kickass sort of anime style art, which has been driven by Wayne Wong Chong. He’s been in the industry like 25 years, at the forefront of 3D digital art. He actually worked previously at Sony as well, released, worked on one of the earliest 3D rendered Spiderman shows, and worked on FIFA and a whole bunch of other awesome games as well. So we’re really being headed up by some top people. The technical team as well have been working on. They’ve made so many A games. There’s one called Siberia and many more. So really, we’re being headed up by some of the top people in this industry. And right now, since we last spoke, we’ve grown quite a lot. So I think last time we spoke, we had about 30 people on the team, maybe if I recall correctly. And now we’re globally distributed team of 80 and expecting to scale from there. So we’ve been going from strength to strength over the past year or two, I would say. And to go back to your original question, our fans have been loving this game so far. We’ve sold thousands of ships pre release, right? We said the game isn’t even base, is coming soon, it’s not fully live yet, and we sold thousands and thousands of the ships on our online store. So people are really excited for this thing and we can’t wait for the bases.

Samson: We’ve also auctioned off one of one, and we have an auction currently running for another one of one. But players are buying the ships because they’re playing the game and they like the ships, and they’re not just speculating because it’s NFT, because they’re not NFTs yet. So I don’t know if you picked this up, but we tried to do everything by the book. So the reason why we haven’t released the INF currency or the NFCs yet is because we’re looking for the right jurisdiction. So we’re actually waiting for Osama to pass their new digital securities laws, which would actually clearly specify that NFTs are not securities. And then we would issue it from a Salvadoran entity that we’re in the process of setting up. So we’re trying to make sure everything is kosher. We’re not over promising things, we’re not trying to do overhyped NXT aspects of the game or even the crypto aspect. In fact, a lot of our design methodology is to hide all of that. So a player coming into the fleet will just see they’re playing a game, and if they really dig into it and they figure it out, they can understand, okay, this is actually a crypto token, and I can move it to a mobile wallet or something like that. But the goal is to hide all that complexity, whereas other games, they’re like, go buy some of this, some Altcoin, buy some salona, buy some Ethereum, and then you can buy the NFT. And then you can farm and make more money in the game because those structures are not sustainable. Right. They’re not really good games first of all. And then second, they’re just a grind like you’re playing to grind and farm money. So for us, game first, that’s why we built up that team. It’s all game developers, whereas other projects, they’re just trying to sell the NFT like they sell the NFPs before they release a playable build another game project. I won’t name names, but they’re selling NFT pictures of their ships. Right. That’s kind of embarrassing. Yeah, you’re selling them to a bunch of guys like me but for us, when we sell the ship, you actually can load up the game client. It’s alpha, it’s rough, but you play with the ship you bought in the game itself. So I’m really excited for beta. The game has improved by leaps and the graphic quality is much higher. We can support a higher number of concurrent users. So you’re going to see these epic space battles and it’s only going to keep getting better from there.

Buck: Seems like with these types of things, so much of it, you’ve got a good product and you’ve got a great team behind it. The next thing, you just got to get a lot of people to know about it. I know you have and you don’t have to talk about who, but a lot of high profile investors. Is that part of the plan to help utilize some of those influencers to try to get the word out?

Mmm Probably. There’s definitely a lot of highprofile investors and we haven’t really pushed that angle yet, but once we’re into beta, we iron out all the bugs and we’re ready to go wider to open beta, we’ll probably leverage a lot of that.

Buck: Yeah, that makes sense. The next step as I understand it well, first we’ve got the game going to Beta in two months from now, but then there’s also trying to get this thing onto a Securitized token platform for trading purposes. Right, the Token. Can you talk a little bit about how that’s going and what the plan is there?

Chris: Sure. So one thing that maybe we didn’t clarify in the first place is that we actually have kind of a jurisdictional split with the token, with the security tokens. So we have the Exodus, which is specifically for us investors because obviously there’s quite a tight regulatory framework that we have to work with, with the SEC and then we have the EXO EU which is registered from a Luxembourg entity and that’s kind of for basically the rest of the world. We’ve essentially carved out the US and the rest of the world. So on the EU side we’re working with BitFenix, so obviously a massive exchange and they launched the Bitfinex Securities platform. So we’re working to do a primary listing on there and we have been working on the regulation there. It’s taken some time working with the regulators. So there has been a little bit of delay on there and we’re still working really fervently on getting it on that side and then the EXO US side. As you said, we are reg 506 C right now. Regd 506 C but we’re working with INX which is quite a large security token platform as well to list the token there, which obviously should give access to liquidity for investors. So that’s the plan. And obviously the security tokens, it’s kind of a fresh, it’s a very innovative new technology having equity on the blockchain, essentially having securities on the blockchain and so we expect massive acceleration over the coming years and obviously lots of opportunities for security tokens to grow and more platforms to exist and list the EXO token. So it’s very early days at the moment and we’re really excited to see where this goes because security tokens have a lot of benefits like 24/7 trading, it could set a lot of the intermediaries because of all the compliance can be quite baked into the token itself and it’s going to be quite innovative and disruptive to try to traditional finance structure as such. So we’re very bullish on this. But as a trailblazer, of course there’s a lot of challenges you have to work with regulators and it just takes time.

Buck: Sure, yeah, of course. From the investor standpoint, I think it’s useful to point out first round a number of people in our group actually did participate at then I think more people even participated at $0.50. Do you know what the initial offering price will be at different securities?

Chris: Yeah, so actually because it has been a little bit of time since our 50 cent offering went live and obviously things have grown, as I said, the company has grown. We’ve started to make some good revenues and things. The price has increased or will increase to $0.80 when it goes live on bitfinex and we estimate that will be within a month or two but we can’t give a firm date. As I say, we’re still working with regulators and we are making some progress but within a couple of months we expect to be listing at that time the price.

Buck: Yes. And this is actually potentially an opportunity because there’s still an opportunity to potentially get in for credit investors at that 50 cent mark, is that correct?

Chris: Correct. Absolutely. Yes indeed.

Buck: Got it. Well great. What am I missing here? Tell me what else we need to know about progress with this? Anything that we didn’t cover, something?

Chris: Samson can you think of anything? Maybe? We want to talk about the global macroeconomic situation right now because I think that it’s quite an interesting time obviously for various investments and things. But one thing that I will say is that it seems that the gaming market certainly is quite robust when it comes to the wider issues.

Buck: So obviously when Covid hit there were a lot of people playing games.

Chris: Well, yeah, there were a lot of people playing games and obviously as a remote working studio, we were kind of used to it. We were poised our production schedule didn’t get knocked back really at all due to Covid.

Samson: Well, the war knocked us back a bit by a month.

Chris: Yes, that’s right, because we did have some Ukrainian staff members. So that certainly did have a bit of an effect on us. I can imagine. But for sure, I think the gaming market is very robust when it comes to investments and things like that and sort of global economic situations.

Buck: Chris so if anyone is interested in potentially participating in that current 50 cent round, how did they get in touch with you?

Chris: I think the best way is to hit me up directly so it’s just chris the normal spelling. Wood. W-O-O-D not woods. Some people say woods. [email protected]. Pixelmatic.com.

Buck: Again, that’s only open to accredited investors, so you’re going to need to have a third party verification and all that stuff. So if you’re in a credit investor, you’re used to that already with other stuff, but just keep that in mind. And by the way, if you can’t understand Chris’s accent or whatever, you could certainly just email me and I will be happy to forward that email on to Chris as well at its bucketwealth formula.com. Chris and Samson, thanks guys, so much for being on the show again. It’s always learn a lot and it’s great to get an update.

Samson: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Chris: It’s a real pleasure Buck. Thank you.

Buck: We’ll be right back.