(upbeat music)
>> Announcer: Live, from Nassau in the Bahamas.
It's the Cube, covering Polycon '18,
brought to you by Polymath.
>> Welcome back to exclusive Cube coverage
in the Bahamas, for Polycon '18.
This is the show about cryptocurrency,
token economics, and the future of work,
and the economies and digital nations.
And the Cube's here for two days of wall-to-wall coverage.
And we're excited to have the CryptoKitties team here.
The phenomenon that took over the blockchain,
really started to show the value of smart contracts,
in a really cool, playful, fun way, really important story.
Jody Rebak and Alex Shih, welcome to the Cube.
>> Hello, welcome!
>> Thanks for having us.
>> So, love the shirts, love to get one for myself someday,
but you got any extra shirts, I'll take one.
>> We do, we do.
>> Okay, great.
>> We'll give you one.
>> Love to have one.
Okay, so CryptoKitties, for the folks
that living under a rock for the past year,
has been a real phenomenon where people were actually,
you know, creating--well you describe it.
>> Okay so CryptoKitties, the purpose is
to bring the first billion people to the blockchain,
and CryptoKitties was the first endeavor
in order to do that.
So it's really a gaming
and collectible game on the blockchain.
It's kind of straightforward.
You buy a kitty, and with your kitty,
you can sell it, breed it, there's a whole marketplace.
You know, since the initial launch,
we've had a bunch of special kitties get released.
We recently launched in China, so there's a ton of kitties
coming down the pipeline, so breed your kitties.
>> So the fun game turned into quite
an interesting experiment, because people love fun,
around tech, when tech is kind of boring sometimes.
You blockchain, you know, what does that actually mean?
What happens under the hood?
So you guys kind of brought a fun piece of it.
Was it by design, the growth?
Was it more like, was it what you expected?
Take us through some of the inside the ropes, the company,
like, was there a moment where you said,
"Oh my god, can you believe what's happening?
Like, this is really taking off."
Or was it planned?
Take us through that.
>> Sure, so I think inherently, the blockchain technology--
like, blockchain is not something
that's inherently easy to explain,
so we wanted to do that in a fun, simple way,
so that people could learn about smart contracts,
and they could learn about all the benefits,
about being decentralized,
and sort of putting trust on the network.
So that was our initial, sort of, goal.
We have an amazing team behind us,
so the creative team just said, like,
"We want to bring kitties to the blockchain."
So the group with Axiom Zen and CryptoKitties has
been working on blockchain technology since 2014.
CryptoKitties was our first public project.
And I think, you know, the team came together very quickly.
I think we built this in four to six months.
You know, I think we were all surprised
with the success of it,
and bringing down the Ethereum network, slowing it down,
so I remember the team launched,
and I woke up one morning with hundreds of emails
from media outlets just saying,
"we want to do a story on you"
It was really, really exciting,
and the team worked really hard,
so we're really proud about it.
>> It's one of those, it is kind of a pinch-me moment,
because you're like, "oh my god,
this is like highly successful."
And that's really fun, and I think it's a great example
of how you can use this fun technology
in a way that people can relate to
but it also brought up some technical challenges
because, I think, at the time, and even now,
it takes a lot, probably the number one use case
of Ethereum blockchain.
I mean, I don't know.
Is there another use case that's actually
as pervasive as CryptoKitties?
>> You know what?
I'm not sure, but I think one of
the really interesting things for us
was we learned a lot with the scalability
and it's been interesting to see,
sort of, other teams reach out to us
and sort of sharing our learnings,
because, I think, in order to continue sort of,
building the ecosystem, we really need to share learnings,
and you know, not hoard information
So, you know, we're definitely looking at scaling,
I think you know one way we've addressed it is sort of
building a lot off-chain to speed up transactions.
But, I think, that there's a lot to learn,
and it's going to take, sort of, the ecosystem working together
and sharing idea and knowledge to--
>> What have you learned?
What are some of the things you guys learned
on the experience, both on the kind of, business-side,
integration-side, developer-side, to some of the really
hard-core, you know tech, infrastructure pieces?
What are the learnings?
>> I think the reality is neither of us are technical people,
so it's probably do a disservice to try and speak to that.
>> Is there one, is there a couple things
that jumped out at you, was it performance, was it just--?
>> I think because there, you know,
we're only starting to see applications built
on the blockchain, you don't know what you don't know.
And the team behind CryptoKitties and Axiom Zen,
we built a number of products, we have a bunch of projects
that we've worked, and we have sort of our developer process
But when you're working with a new technology,
and you don't know what you're dealing with,
it's hard to anticipate, and I think,
following best practices, leveraging, you know,
other teams and working with the community, that's I think
what we learned most, is you need to, you know, rely
on the community and share learnings.
>> Take a minute to talk about what you guys do there,
each of you, what your role is at CryptoKitties,
what you're focused on, and what's going on
in the company--without giving away all
of the trade-secrets of course.
>> Yeah I know, there's a lot we can't talk about.
>> I mean, what's your role?
What are you guys overseeing?
What are you building?
>> Perhaps we should explain a bit about Axiom Zen, first
and kind of the set up amongst CryptoKitties,
if you want to take a stab at that.
>> Sure, so Axiom Zen is a venture studio.
We've been around for five years.
So, we have a part of the business
that's focused on consumer blockchain technologies.
We have quite a big enterprise SAAS business.
So one of our companies is called ZenHub,
if you've ever heard of them, ZenHub,
and then we have sort of a joint venture
part of the business where we work
with companies to build and launch amazing
and impactful tech companies.
So, CryptoKitties was born out of our consumer blockchain,
and specifically, our foundry.
So my role with Axiom Zen is, I'm Chief of Staff,
and I work with the Executive team on strategy,
I work with the Operations team,
a lot of special projects and a lot of, you know,
with tech companies, there's always things,
special initiatives that are coming up,
and I really love to focus on that.
>> And you've got to be always learning, right?
I mean, like you said, you're trying new things.
>> Yeah
>> So it's kind of like, a studio, meets venture incubator,
meets R and D, meets builder culture.
>> Everything, yeah, and I think sort of,
I'll let Alex speak to his role,
but one of the reasons, our team is 80 people.
CryptoKitties' team is 30, but everyone who comes
and joins the team is an entrepreneur at heart,
so I think that's why we've been able to accomplish so much.
>> Alex, your role.
>> So, I recently joined the company,
and I came on as CFO, so--
>> So you run all the numbers, man,
those gas prices on less than twenty.
So, I mean, you got to keep the trains running,
making sure the lights are on
>> Sure.
>> 80 people total, including the 30 in the CryptoKitties?
>> Yeah, inclusive of the 30.
>> Okay, so, what's the outlook?
What's the objective of the firm?
You guys continue to experiment?
Do new, more projects?
>> Yeah, I think, so one of our,
we wrote and published the ERC721 token.
We didn't do it, but someone--Dieter Shirley did,
within the team, so I think we want to continue
to focus on that.
You know, we have a number of projects in the pipeline
that we're not able to talk about publicly,
but definitely exciting this happening.
Continuing to build CryptoKitties,
I mentioned we did a China launch,
so we're continuing to expand and just build,
so yeah, we've got a lot of exciting things to do.
>> China must be really big.
(Alex laughs)
>> Yeah. >> Must be huge.
>> Yeah, one of--
>> Asia must be hot.
>> Yeah, well, I think sort of--
>> Mobile phone usage, just incredible.
>> They're leaders in the collectible gaming space,
so it naturally made sense for us to go there.
>> Great, well, hey, congratulations.
What's going to be the outlook for CryptoKitties?
You mentioned the marketplace.
What are some of the cool things
that are going on, that you can point out,
that people might not know?
>> Do you want to talk about our China launch,
and the special kitties, or?
>> I think you're doing a great job, keep going.
>> (laughs) Okay so you know, we recently launched in China,
it's Chinese New Year, so we have a bunch
of sort of special kitties being released.
We just had a company call earlier today,
where we saw a preview of some of the kitties
that are being bred.
There's some dragon kitty, there's dog kitty,
so I guess, look at the cool kitties.
Building a story of your kitties.
>> I think it's just been great stuff,
again, like I said, at Sundance,
we saw the VR/AR world starting to really
go down this road of some new creative digital,
and I think this is a great example
of where I see it going which is you know
taking this new decentralized infrastructure
and creating new experiences,
so congratulations, CryptoKitties.
>> Thank you. >> Thank you.
>> Alright, the Cube bringing new crypto experiences
to our footage again we're going to do
a lot of blockchain cryptocurrency shows.
This is the first one of the year,
been covering bitcoin since 2010,
so we're proud of that, and look for the cube at events,
but here at the Bahamas, we'll be here
for a whole nother day tomorrow, keep on watching,
got a few more interviews to wrap up day one,
got some big guests coming,
be right back after this short break.
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