In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Jamie Thomson, CEO of Vulcan Forged, talks about the future of the metaverse, the future of blockchain gaming, play-to-earn sustainability, and how to get your coin listed on big exchanges.
About Jamie Thomson
Jamie Thomson is the CEO of Vulcan Forged, one of the leading blockchain game studios and makers of VulcanVerse powered by $PYR. Vulcan Forged is an established non-fungible token (NFT) game studio, marketplace, and Decentralized App incubator with 15 games, a userbase of 120,000, and a top 10 NFT marketplace volume.
He lives in Greece, graduating with a Master in Education and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex and Washington, respectively.
Jamie Thomson gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- Metaverse future – what to expect
- The future of blockchain gaming
- Play to earn sustainability
- How gaming and creativity can utilize blockchain technology
- Getting listed on big exchanges – the dos and don’ts
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, and I’m super pumped to have today’s guest on the show. He’s coming in hot from beautiful Greece, just outside of Athens. Today we have Jamie Thomson, the CEO of Vulcan Forged, one of the leading Blockchain Game Studios and makers of VulcanVerse which is powered by PYR token. Vulcan Forged is an established NFT game studio, marketplace, and Decentralized App incubator with 15 games, a user base of 120,000 and a top 10 NFT marketplace volume. Jamie currently lives in Greece and graduated with a Master’s in Education and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex and Washington. Respectively Jamie super pumped to have you on welcome to the podcast, my friend.
Jamie Thomson
Thank you very much, Matt. It’s lovely to be here. Big fan of your podcast. So it’s a bit surreal being on here myself. So thank you for having me.
Matt Zahab
Appreciate the kind words mate, I’d like to start with a fire thread that you’ve had a couple of weeks ago and, that was sort of your best lessons, your five best lessons of 2022 I’ll ring them off for you. I absolutely loved it. Your five lessons are as follows. Number one, there’s always someone who does better so use them. Number two, saying no is initially hard, but it will make life easier. Number three 99% of Crypto Twitter doesn’t do diligence, which is so freakin true. Number four, cardio is better for weights for mood, which might be a hot take. I can’t wait to get into that. And number five, writing stuff down, i.e. your schedules and goals actually works, which I completely agree on. What made you write this thread, but you just shown at the end of the year being like yeah, like this is what I learned.
Jamie Thomson
Yeah, it was just sort of midnight laying down on my sofa realized I haven’t tweeted for about four days, everything I tweet is usually Vulcan Forged related. So I thought I would share my job bits of wisdom in a way to bring it to engage as many followers as possible. But yeah, I mean there was some reasoning behind it. I mean, the first one is what the most important I mean, obviously is we’re a bootstrap company. So it was literally just me and one other person four years ago. And as you get bigger and bigger, it’s very easy to let the ego sort of controlled. And really, I think you could do everything and, not let go of your babies that were. And I think it was probably a good two, three years into that where you realize well look there is someone who is trained to be a marketing officer, there’s someone trained to be a campaign manager, proofreader as much as your idea and, you’re the founder. There are people who know things better than you. And since I sort of delegated a lot more of the company to other people and hired better sea levels and more staff, things just got a whole lot easier. So that one will really pay close to home I think.
Matt Zahab
And you guys have grown to have what over 120 employees, I believe like how crazy is that growing a company from 2 people to 120 like that in your headcount.
Jamie Thomson
I know. It’s mad is phase three, when you when you say like that, but it just happened doesn’t happen overnight. It just sort of just sort of grows and you think okay we need more employees here, more employees there you do count one day and you realize that is it as big as it is. And I don’t think we were prepared, really because we’re in the metaverse area and the trend and we sort of roads that rose that hype up last year. And that’s when things just got utterly surreal. It was actually kind of scary really because you know PYR was a token we put out just literally for fun, actually a utility token for the games. And then Binance listeners who are telling us and Hobi Bliss is telling us and we’re just like, oh hang on a second, you got to get market makers go do this. And they’re all over Twitter. Everyone’s talking about people who are just like what what’s going on here? And so yeah, it was quite the learning experience. But I’m kind of glad for this whole bear market. Well, that already exists allowed us to kind of just focus back on to the basics again, regroup, have a proper strategy, proper people, and just sort of settle back down and build into those stealth modes of learning. Get ready for a game when it happens.
Matt Zahab
I love that and saying no is initially harder but it makes life easier. I’m a big Tim Ferriss guy, I love the Tim Ferriss Podcast, I’ve read all of his books. He was the one who got me on this, you should be saying no 99% of the time actually was Navall Ravikant who says, if you’re not 100% yes, if you’re not even if you’re 99%, it’s a no, that’s a great quote. You have any specific examples of where that was a word that has been so helpful?
Jamie Thomson
Yeah, I mean again yeah, definitely. With the business of the beginning, you kind of want to please everybody, and you want to say yes to every podcast, and everyone. You gotta be kidding you’re so small that everyone knows you as an investor. So you’re kind of buddy that want the community. So, oh, can we have a meeting here? Can you help me with that? And you say yep, sure. And he realized that actually, humans in general are very well, they’re resourceful creatures. If you say no, and you can’t do something and people can handle it, that they’ll work it out. They won’t get offended. And you’re right, exactly that unless you’re 100 million% wanting to do it, there’s nothing wrong with saying no. And I think that can be translated to other walks of life. You know, when a friend invites you out, or you there’s some sort of party or some vacation you think, well, if I say no, they’re gonna think this and the other one that well, who cares? You know, just if you don’t want go, you’re not gonna enjoy it anyway. So say no. So yeah, again, it was business related, I would have thought and now because say no is far easier, and they don’t get offended, and they don’t sort of I think you’re the devil incarnate. And you know in fact they probably respect you more for having the boundaries to say, you know, this is what I want and don’t want.
Matt Zahab
100% you said that precedent and my favorite one of the five Jamie and easily the hottest take cardio is better for weights mood, you’d rather go on a nice long run or a nice long bike than, you know, throw a bunch of heavy iron or metal around really?
Jamie Thomson
Well I mean, for vanity purposes, weight always wins. But I’ve never come out the gym after a weight workout and felt like just that positive the endorphins you have if you do like even a five-kilometer run or the cardio or something about burning up that long square that just makes you feel like you’ve achieved something, well, that energy is gone. I’ve never got that I’ve just wait and obviously both for the best thing to do. And that one thing is a bit random compared to the other four. But I was thinking well, what can I do I need to make five, I can’t do four pearls of wisdom.
Matt Zahab
It is very true. I always find when I go on even just like a 5k run or even just a long walk. The reason why you perhaps I feel a little better after a pretty sort of strenuous gym session is because when I’m in the gym, I’m really focused on getting every ounce out of that set. Whereas on that run it’s just like after sort of the 10-minute mark whether I’m listening to a podcast or music or nothing, it’s just my mind just wanders, you know, I feel like it’s almost a source of meditation.
Jamie Thomson
It is mindfulness, you’ve got no choice but to focus on your breathing. There’s nothing else around and of course the physical benefits are there and yeah, absolutely agreed with you. It’s Oh, I didn’t know you were on the same page. I thought you when you said hot take, it means you are going to disagree with that point.
Matt Zahab
No, to be honest, I did but after thinking about it, I was like damn, he’s already got me I’m already going back. It’s really not that hard of a take. He’s right to. I love it. Let’s get into some of the fun stuff here. You currently live in Greece. Why the move if you don’t mind me ask it. I mean Grayson’s a treat but why Greece, in all places?
Jamie Thomson
It is what it was five years ago my ex-wife now. I mean, it was Greek. So I moved there five years ago, and we had a little daughter. So and then I set up the office here. And so that was five years ago. And I just obviously I can’t leave now because I’ve got a four year old girl here. And we’ve got the main offices here. And so we’ve got you know about 50 staff here and the Greek office. I’ve got a child here and just my base and just you know, was Greece. And because I’ve never really identified with the UK very much. There’s something very fast paced and individualistic about you know, the lifestyle in the UK, whereas Greece is a lot more family oriented. You know, people know each other that, you know, they happen to sort of talk to strangers, I’ve noticed this is a friendly place to be one of the first country I’ve lived in where I felt like actually, at home when I was here. And of course the summer here is something else. It’s not it’s not like Dubai, you repeat. It’s just like dry beautiful beaches. Yeah, exactly so lots of good reasons to be here.
Matt Zahab
And walk me through sort of what you did before getting into Crypto, obviously Vulcan has taken off, you guys are a big player in the space, you’ve developed partnerships with some incredible companies and names like Anthony Scaramucci, and Skybridge. We’ll get into all that. But before we do walk me through sort of Jamie Thomson pre Crypto and how you got into it.
Jamie Thomson
Yeah. So as you said, before I was into education in England, I was I was a teacher there. And I sort of taught children in with behavioral difficulties like you know, that juvenile delinquent centers and like who were prisoners or didn’t have like a opportunity to go to mainstream school. And then I just randomly met a Greek lady. And you know and, before you know I’m just married with a child. And after about two months, and I’m in Greece and, it’s like you know and, I had to get like a job immediately over here in Greece and, it was a terrible job. I think it was like 500 euros a month. And I was just proofreading terrible finance, you know, English essays. And I thought well, this is easy. I’ll do this half a day. And the other half of the day, I’ll just like work on my own little project. So I create I came with this idea called Very Arty, which is like verified art, which was basically open sea before open sea was open sea. And so I had this idea of digital NFTs and no one understood it. No one bought it. There’s a talk of me at Web Summit in Lisbon many years ago trying to sell the idea there was like you know, what’s NFT? So I dropped that. I know, It’s crazy. I should have pushed it. So I dropped that project off the wall. I mean, it was been bringing a new maybe 5 10 grand or something. I thought okay, it’s a market but not enormous. And then open CK and it was just like blew everything out of the water. I was like, oh, goodness me there is a market so level we know what’s lacking. Oh, I know games. So I sort of got covered developers together. We made some you know, crappy card game. I can’t remember what it’s called and with NFTs and they just they just sold out. Like I think we sold about 40,000 euros, which at the time when I was earning 400 euros a month. It was it was incredible. It was like okay, there is a market for this right. Well, let’s go big and then we saw Sandbox and Decentraland. And they were just coming out as ideas. I thought, Well, why not something a bit more MMO related bit more World of Warcraft related. So recruited more we develop a team we created VulcanVerse that sold out and again, it was just another step upon step and just you know, the ideas just kept coming. Or if you can do an open world game, we can do a CCG, we can do a tower defense game of poker, run a game and, then the Metaverse wave came. So by that time, we’d already positioned ourselves as a Metaverse company and yeah, so there’s a PYR which just blew up into like, you know, a billion dollar market cap out of nowhere and then crashed again, of course, live the other bloody token, but you know, is what it is and up. Yeah, that’s pretty much the ride. I think the last five years.
Matt Zahab
What in particular about digital art or creating that marketplace and the Metaverse like, were there any talks or mentors or resources or places where you’ve learned about the Metaverse and Crypto and more specifically digital art that allowed you to come up with sort of, you know, the first version of open see before it that like, you know what I mean? Like I friends, yeah, and she was super early because of a friend of a friend or because they bought drugs off the dark net need a Bitcoin? Like, what was it that tipped you off into this whole area?
Jamie Thomson
Yeah, no good question. It was, um, I started trading, like this job in 2018, or 17, or whatever it was. So I bought the complete top of Bitcoin when it was I think the top was like 18k there. So and then I just got obsessed with it. And I kept buying the dip, I kept losing all the money, because I kept dipping and dipping a different thing. Okay, so I understood about Crypto from that. So I guess the next step was, I kind of ran into the idea of an NFT. But in my camp, it was more of a business sense and NFT, like not a digital art, but like maybe an IP or something in NFT. And I don’t know. I know one of my best friends happened to be a game designer sorry, a graphic designer in a gaming company. And he just makes the most incredible 3D Fantasy Art. And I thought, I wonder if we just don’t touch on a few of these sort of fantasy characters into an NFT using IPFS. They’ll sell and we sold it to some friends and some people within the community of the Blockchain will be using and they did okay. People were like, what’s the point you can just right click and download them and all this kind of stuff. The court and that was your idea. But it wasn’t a failure was more so okay. I was surprised if people even bought it to start with. And it was interesting. People were coming out. Well, I don’t want NFT is. But I like that idea is only 100. And I’m a collector at heart. So I’m going to buy one anyway. Who knows. So I guess that collector mentality is what the NFT founders have really tapped into people like to collect scarcity. And so yeah, so it was that I suppose sort of happy accident.
Matt Zahab
Happy accident. Another happy accident I love this story. This is one of the most bonkers stories I’ve ever heard. PYR getting listed by arguably now I guess the two biggest Binance and Hubi I believe and you guys. No green light, no nothing. It was just a this. This token has some volume, a little bit of momentum. We’re gonna throw it up. Like, did you just wake up one morning and was like, What the heck is going on?
Jamie Thomson
Exactly that! I woke up one morning, a seven folks are like messages from everyone on Telegram and people say congratulations. What they congratulated me for? And we saw the announcement. They were gonna lift us within like, two, three hours. And we had nothing positioned. I mean in retrospect, it was kind of obvious, because there were some people in the community of the asking questions and, they were obviously you know, that’s how they, I mean, it goes to show that these exchanges do due diligence. They don’t just, like pay what you want, and they’ll list you. You can’t just pay your way into the exchanges. They tend to go for trends. So they predicted obviously, the Metaverse trend was going to be a big one. So they were there are all the Metaverse tokens. And they must have thought, oh PYR let’s go look at the community see if it’s organic. And yeah, we had nothing. We had like two hours a scramble for market makers together. So it you know, we didn’t know what we were doing at the time. Because again, you know, the whole Crypto Trading was new to me, I traded myself, I didn’t ever own my own token and all this kind of stuff. So we got the best market maker we could find in two hours, which wasn’t even that good just to stop it just completely imploding on launch. But yeah, I think it still did implode on launch a little bit. But at least then we learned we learn how to do it. And we were just thrown into the incidence of big league straightaway. And then you sort of learn about market makers, if you find out about it. It’s a fascinating process. And I don’t want to sort of get myself in hot water by exposing too much about how the process is but I would love one day, you know, once all this you know, when I retire the agent whenever 78 or whatever, I’d love to do a podcast about how the interest intricacies of Crypto works behind the scenes like what exchanges asked for. How you get these marketing things will be all the stuff that people probably want to know about, but don’t know about. So it’s been a real insight.
Matt Zahab
Give us the TLDR like you don’t have to go super high low level kind of thing. And obviously I don’t want to scare you in any capacity but like walk me through some of this small things that the average Joe wouldn’t know like you talked about market making when you launch your token if you don’t have a market maker, people can sort the shit out of it right away, you can get absolutely toasted. Like walk us through some of the intricacies that perhaps you know, the average Joe or Josephine wouldn’t be cautious enough.
Jamie Thomson
Yeah, well some exchanges probably, top 10 loads 10 to 20. They pretty much duplicity for a fee, that as long as you’re not some terrible scam projects you know, they will ask for like, a fee which is in the hundreds of 1000s, usually, depending on what the market is. And then you can list there, but the conditions are listed on an exchange, you have to have a market maker now I thought the word market like beforehand was like, Oh, that can’t be legal, or how can you have a market maker but it’s actually totally legal because you need liquidity in the books. I mean, there’s no way any token has like people buying every single second of everything and buying and selling so it’s not about that. It’s about keeping liquidity and like you know, so people sell a lot it won’t dump the price. If it will buy a lot you can you can get that and use it again to buy again. So there are different Americans do a whole thread about how market making works. There’s different strategies market making uses. You have to sign contracts of course, when you when you signed to exchange, but yeah, it’s hard. I would love to share some of the stuff on that. And another thing is some of these YouTube things till the beginning, we were like doing all these AMAs live with as many communities that we have. And it’s crazy. Some of the these YouTube personalities, we never went with them at the end. And I’m not gonna mention any names. It’s just like they send you like, it’s like a menu, but submenu of like we can get it’s, the whole thing is just it’s a business within a business. Everything you can is monetized in this world. So yeah, I’ll do an AMA one day when I’m when I’m safe and retired perhaps.
Matt Zahab
It’s crazy how it’s every step of the way, right? And then there’s a lot of things people don’t understand like you know, let’s say for example, you’re in Europe right now let’s see, the majority of your community is in Europe and, I’m currently in North America, the majority of my community is in North America, you have China who even though they still are technically not allowed to their Telegram groups from China that have 20x, our target market slash demographic and, you need to jump on an AMA with them. And they have translators, because obviously, I do not speak Mandarin or Cantonese. And then they will you know, translate everything I say. And if you get your ducks in a row and, you can convince them to buy your token, you now have a massive Chinese community who as well who like there’s just there’s so many little just like you said, people with menus their Telegram groups here, YouTube creators here, TikTok guys here, it’s just every step of the way is fully monetized, from literally token launch all the way up to actually getting it listed. And then once that happens, it’s the reverse down as well. It’s bananas.
Jamie Thomson
It is. I mean, I always thought you know, when we listen and buy that I thought okay, well what now you know, I get we are on Coinbase now, because there’s one more step up, but it was like okay, what now that’s the end. And then I remember, like some people said to me, no, this is just the beginning, you know, the markets gonna still gonna go up and down. But at least you’re on the biggest exchange now. So it’s accessible to others. Yeah, and then on top of what you said, sometimes you get picked up by an influencer to a totally organic leader who has a big following. And they says, Oh, I’m getting this and he was looking at the candle. And it’s just like, front, we had that once last year, I think it went from $4 to $10. In literally because one guy who was quite big tweeted about us, and it was just you know, holy moly. And then people tagged on to the $10 that, okay, goodly went up to $50. And people started talking about this, the next Axie and then that kind of narrative runs with people and it just, it shows how much is speculation. But yeah, know it’s a fascinating world, if not a bit stressful the biggest stress of it all I think for me it’s not so much the workload, it’s the fact you’ve got 1000s 10s of 1000s of investors on your shoulders. And like you know in any market, whether it’s a bear market, especially in a bear market, anything you do which they loved before now is just like you know, it’s the devil acting and, you just can’t get anything, right. And you feel that and I go to bed and, I wake up with it feeling like okay, you know, because I have to obviously, I can’t alter the price and shouldn’t care about the price, but you do because, you know, it affects investors, and you want them to be happy. But there’s nothing you can do. If it’s a bear market, you got to keep delivering and get through it. That’s the most stressful thing really, having a community which are always wanting you to deliver, basically make them rich you know.
Matt Zahab
it’s also much different being a publicly traded Fortune 500 CEO versus being a, you know, a CEO of a billion-dollar Crypto organization. Whereas if I wanted to hit up some CEO from Fortune 500 I’d have to get through five different assistants and maybe if I send in a perfect cold email, I could get my foot in the door but with you, I can just cha-cha slide into your DMs or I can hit you up on Discord or you don’t I mean, like it’s a whole different world.
Jamie Thomson
It is. I’ll tell you where and if I didn’t reply it would be like well, the CEOs doesn’t respond. The CEOs not do this not Docs is not transparent enough. I’m talking about community every day and I’m there and even now committee members messaged me and I helped them with an issue I’m thinking imagine like a shareholder of Tesla just you know phoning up Elon Musk and asking him for like a proper thing but that’s Crypto because there’s been so many friggin scams in the space you need to be fully transparent you have to be there you can’t just be like behind a mask and all this kind of stuff you have to be there in order to be successful.
Matt Zahab
Very true. Jamie we’re gonna take a quick break and when we get back, we are going to talk everything Vulcan Forged related Metascapes Gaming Elysium the B2B part and of course VulCon 3 with Anthony Scaramucci and SkyBridge. But until then, gotta give a huge shout out to our sponsor the show that is PrimeXBT we at Cryptonews love PrimeXBT as they have been longtime friends and incredible partners. They offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or vet. You can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. They are also blessing listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast with a huge promo code. Use the promo code CRYPTONEWS50 that’s CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50. All one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Jamie. Okay, let’s get into some of the fun stuff here. One of my favorite things about Vulcan is the Metascapes, which is pretty much like a Metaverse as a service. I guess that wouldn’t be SAS they would almost be mass. Yeah, mass some mass. And this will compete with Metas Horizon Worlds, which is sort of their version of Metaverse as a service where, whether you’re an individual company and, again I don’t even think there’s betas out yet. They’re still very early stage, but you can come out, and you can pretty much whip up your own Metaverse. There’s a huge need for that because creating a Metaverse and sharing virtual worlds is an extremely complex process. I know you guys are working on this with a lot of educational institutions, it seems like a perfect fit. It’s just so much more fun to sort of learn and be engaged in a Metaverse instead of just been on a Zoom call where you’re literally checked out in four minutes. Walk me through that whole process. How difficult has it been to build this? I know you guys, I believe you just launched main net as well. But tell me what you have moving groovin in that regard?
Jamie Thomson
Yeah, sure. So I think Metascapes came out of more trial and error with our whole play to earn economy. I think the whole play to earn thing I think is fundamentally flawed in that you can’t really marry the two, the two mindsets of playing for fun and trying to make money. I mean, people still will pay to play games. And the minute you start putting away to earn money, people don’t care about the quality of the game. People don’t care what they do want to get as much money. So they’re two completely different demographics. And that really jaded me for a while thinking well, okay, we will plan to combine the gaming market with the Crypto market and it’d be a zillion dollar market, but they are two very independent markets. So we kind of steered away from the play to earn model a little bit and we still have it in our games, but you’ve got to earn a lot of experience, you’ve got to play a lot to get there. You know, I’ll just get farmers coming in finding exploits and grinding just for the money. So we kind of think well, we’ve made this wonderful engine and built VulcanVerse where you can build your own plots which is kind of cool. So you can sort of build like a Hades underworld land and like in our Arcadian shrine, all this kind of stuff. We thought, well, okay, that’s cool. So why don’t we do outsource our work to some other Metaverses some other benefits projects asks us to do it for them, good for them. So well hang on a second what about making this engine a lot more universal. So we thought okay, so here’s our chance to kind of start again, a little bit. Minecraft is a multi-million user application. I mean we’re talking you know, hundreds of millions of users, they don’t get any money out of this. And they still play, creativity, vanity this stuff sells. I mean, people love making things and showing it off. So there is a market for that. So we thought, Well, okay, well, that’s what the whole idea of Metascapes is. It’s kind of like Minecraft on the Blockchain. So there’s no earning potential is in terms of gameplay, you sort of just you know, morph your land in a world in a stylized cartoon way, a little bit better graphics and Minecraft and, then you tokenize that plot into an NFT. And you can sort of sell it to others and sort of, you know, combine plots and land and it’s infinite kind of world really. And that also came off the back of VulcanVerse only being 10,000 plots, which was like, it seemed to be the thing at the time Sandbox decentral land was all limited plots of lands with our Woodlore limited, but the trouble that is it just means you’ve got 10,000 users. And so yeah, so I guess Metascapes is probably the evolution of Blockchain virtual worlds, I’d say is one of most exciting products for us.
Matt Zahab
It’s weird to the whole 10,000 sort of NFT or PLA thing was so cookie cutter and cliche and it was just the standard when like at the end of the day, it’s against me that scars to the aspect for price to go boom. But if the goal is to create a game and 90% of NFT projects do have some game intertwined and integrated in it. The whole point of a game is to get mass adoption like you look at the Call of Duty’s and the FIFA is and the NBA and the World of Warcraft and Neopets, whatever your goal is, but it’s like those were hundreds of millions of users each. Like it’s weird I was sorta asked backwards.
Jamie Thomson
It’s like we regressed a little bit. I mean, the play to earn market is nowhere near it’s not even a fraction of the gaming market. The gaming market is I think, $10 billion or something stupid a year. There’s more than that, probably. And people pay to play. I mean, you’re not going to stop people paying for a better game. So that’s the case. It’s like why bribing users to play a game of yours was played to earn so but everything’s got to start somewhere. And I think NFTs are without doubt going to be a part of something in entertainment, whether or not it’s gaming, I don’t know there’s a reason that World of Warcraft hasn’t adopted it. There’s a reason Call of Duty doesn’t have it. Ubisoft tried to do NFTs they were met with massive resistance for that. So maybe it’s not just like you say the 10,000 thing for NFTs if you notice the NFT artwork, it’s very niche. It’s very clicky. It’s certainly you know, real digital artists won’t sell very well. They do NFTs or fight there’ll be hatred for in their community. It’s like it’s apes. It’s Crypto punks. It’s like very obscure weird art. So I think it’s a whole new demographic you’re entertaining with this whole NFT idea and how big that demographic is remains to be seen. I suppose.
Matt Zahab
So Jamie, you and I are in the same yacht in regards to play to earn and, I think play to earn is I think the term is dead. I think it has to be done. I think I’m pretty darn positive, that it has to be a play have fun, like traditional gaming and, perhaps you could earn you know, it’s not like before where it was earning is the bread and butter. It is the primary value prop of said gamer said you know, NFT community or economy. I feel like it’s got to be play, have fun with your mates. And if you have a chance to earn that’s great. But like don’t expect earnings to be the primary aspect.
Jamie Thomson
Right yeah. And even that the minute you’re putting, like the slight chance of earning, then the people you’re going to be attracting to the earning potential are going to be focused on that. And what are the many earning in you’re putting a ceiling on the creative, the how good the quality of the game can be, because Axie Infinity was I say huge within Crypto gaming, because of the earning potential. I mean, the graphics and gameplay wasn’t exactly Call of Duty if people didn’t want it to be, it was just like a way of visualizing a way of grinding money. So yeah, you’re right. I mean, I would say kind of scrapped the earning altogether. However, I do think there is some to be said about ownership of assets within a game, whether that’s even just for an emotional attachment to something you like. And knowing is scarce is like magic trading cards. That something I think which will continue to thrive. But yeah, I agree with you I think we’re on the same page regarding the play to earn model.
Matt Zahab
And speaking of gaming, you guys are literally cranking out games like by the week, by the month, you guys have a shit ton of talent joining Vulcan Studios, which is the gaming arm or within the whole sort of Vulcan Forged ecosystem, talking about the importance of creating games and, also the difficulty, I’ve been very fortunate to work with a couple incredible teams who have created and are still working on games. Coming up with a game is bananas as is like you’re literally just making something out of thin air. And then you need to hope that your art hits and then you need to hope that your game economy hits and then you need to hope that it catches STEAM. It’s like it is you know, difficult. And then there’s the talent side. There’s only so many game developers in the world. And a lot of them get picked up by the big boys and girls as well. So like what exactly process and how, why is this such an important part of mass adoption in Web3?
Jamie Thomson
Yeah and, on top of that, you hit the nail on the head of your way they just game development in general is a very hard thing to do. It’s not just a couple of Devs you’ve got game design documents, project management, art assets at ability. And but the worst thing and the hardest thing or this is the Web3 aspect because a lot of these investors haven’t bought a token as part of a gaming studio before. Usually they’re buying a token for a Blockchain or for a DeFi App or whatever. They don’t understand that making a game isn’t like launching test net launching main net, launching a Dex in like a couple of months. So you know, these take months if not years, sometimes I know World of Warcraft had five, six years to make. But you couldn’t expect people to hold your token for five years and hope you build World of Warcraft. So you try and counter that by being transparent and related showing every day what you’re releasing, showing Alpha allowing people in and like even if like, you know the wolves arms on its head and producers head is whatever like that floating around, you let them in. Now that works fine for the first half a year because they can see you building it. But then the community get pissed off because they’re like well, they’re angry now because you know, they’re fed up with the bucks. And then well, I want the perfect game. Now you know, when’s it gonna be ready, like, well we’re showing you this to show our progress on it. It’s either we don’t show you anything or at least when it’s in it’s completely full. And you just trust us. We’re doing it. So you’ve got the impatient Crypto investor and they really are impatient. So you’ve got to keep them happy but the same time deliver good game. So yeah, that adds another dimension of difficulty to it for sure.
Matt Zahab
That’s craziness, a little bit of nightmare fuel. Let’s jump into Elysium there are an insane amount of projects and NFTs coming tons of tools, games NFT craters, you name it. And you and the team intend to position Elysium as one of the busiest and widely used layer ones in the space is heck they already have a post of big names already lined up to host their collections and whatnot as well. Why the partnership with Elysium obviously they have very low fees, extremely high speed, Fortune 500 companies are using them as well but like walk me through the whole process of why you chose to partner with them.
Jamie Thomson
Well actually Elysium is our layer one Blockchain we’ve made it so we’re not we’re not partnering with them. So Elysium is a Blockchain we’ve made just like actually made Ronin we made a Elysium.
Matt Zahab
Oh wow. I should on my research there my bad Jamie.
Jamie Thomson
Yeah, so were Elysium was our low on Blockchain we thought like you know, if we’re going to own our own economy or your own games, we might as well own our own Blockchain as well. So um, we were not really reinventing the wheel completely with the Blockchain, making a layer one nowadays isn’t super like crazy difficult, like it was back in the day. I mean, it’s a substrate EVM compatible layer one. But yeah, with it plant trees. The more you use it as Metaverse, right is, so we just wanted to own our own sort of chain as it were. And that gives a lot more demand to PYR for gas and, we’ve obviously because of Anthony as you know, from Skybridge, he’s got some wonderful connections with pretty much any celebrity you want to get on there. We can get on there as an NFT collection. So when the market turns and everything’s running, we’ll start sort of doing a lot of drops and odd names and such. So yeah, it was more kind of this sort of own our own products in house as it were.
Matt Zahab
Why and how did the partnership with Anthony Scaramucci and Skybridge How did that all go down?
Jamie Thomson
How did it go down? I think I met him through a friend of a friend and we just got on really well. He’s uh, you know I know he got a lot of well no he didn’t. He was very honest with their own FTX thing was a real blow to him. And he was totally an utterly sideline by that. I mean, he was he like Sam, utterly just rug pulled in the eyes over a random that I think, as he came out on CNBC, and he explained the whole process, and you could see the way he talked there, that directness and that honesty was what got me interested in talking to him originally. I guess he found that about me as well. And we so we just sort of just, you know, shot the ship for a little bit and just had a little chat. We both been divorced. So we there was like a nice talk topic to talk about. And he was getting into Crypto and he was talking about Crypto funds. And he knew the Metaverse wave was next. And we just chatted and he lived and he did his due diligence, and went to his offices up in Wall Street, which was a total surreal experience in itself. You’re sitting down with this guy. He is yes. well suited and booted, like getting what we might tie on. And he was just casually sitting there and he’s like jumper like his feet on the table. I was like, Okay, I overdress a little bit here, but you know and, he took a leap of faith for this and, so he’s really behind us. And he’s not like some lot of these VCs just one tokens now just shark you and just sell them. It’s not about that at all. It’s just like, he won’t he will be there. All through the bitter end retweet us he tweets us, he gets a speaking slot for everyone. So yeah, it’s a good balance ahead. He’s the only VCI we have on board and even in that respect, is not even a VC it’s more sort of someone who’s pushing us as much as we can.
Matt Zahab
And he’s also he’s gonna speak VulCon 3, right?
Jamie Thomson
For sure. He’s organizing actually so VulCon 3 is going to be in New York on the 26th of May. There’s only 250 tickets this time it always sells out the last one Athens sold out immediately. 500 600 tickets. We are quite famous these events. We’ve got some live shows and all sorts this one will be more Elysium oriented. So the Blockchain project projects joining Elysium of course eventually running it’s going to be a great show. If you’re about Matt I offer you VIP ticket on the house on me if you want to come.
Matt Zahab
Love that. When is it May 25? I’ll be there in New York?
Jamie Thomson
Yeah, in New York.
Matt Zahab
I’ll be there. Well get some good PR going for y’all I’ll film the whole event we’ll get some good interviews.
Jamie Thomson
Thank you, my man I appreciate that.
Matt Zahab
That is awesome. Jamie truly a treat man a couple more questions then we’ll wrap up you gotta jump in the hot take factory I grilled you earlier for having a hot take which was actually not even a hot take it was just the real and legitimate take what hot takes you got for me? It doesn’t have to be tech or Crypto related. It can be health, wealth, happiness, politics, sports, geography, space, AI give me a couple Jamie hot takes it only really you believe in where most other people do not
Jamie Thomson
Okay, you’re gonna have to clarify what hot take mean. I think this is an American terminology. We don’t have that phrase in here. I don’t know what a hot take is.
Matt Zahab
So a hot take would be something that only you believe in where most other people don’t. For exqample, one thing that I say that gets me in trouble is I believe that happiness is a choice. I believe that even when I’m feeling down or even when you know I’m a little bit in the gutter, I can do something like go for a run and look in the mirror and just put a big old smile on and be happy. I think that at the end of the day, it is a choice. And I feel like a lot of people sort of enjoy being on the other end of that spectrum and perhaps enjoy being. So that’s something controversial, like a controversial tape perhaps.
Jamie Thomson
I’ll say that no matter how popular guy friendly you think you are, if you really were honest with yourself, you could probably only count true friends on one hand and, I mean that and I really mean that like and, the only way you would know that would be become successful. Become in a bad situation. See who isn’t jealous and, is there for you when you’re successful? Happy for you, generally, and who will be there for you when you’re down? And I’ll be I assure you, it’ll be less than five people in your hand about a how many 10s of 1000s of followers you think you’ve got, I think we’ve only really got you know, one hands worth of true friends is my hot take.
Matt Zahab
Very well said I love that good shit. Also, Jamie you’re just from looking you’re a bit of a brick shithouse you’re a big lad. What’s the workout routine? How do you run a company like this and stay in good shape?
Jamie Thomson
Well, you just force yourself no matter how you just do it. I mean, people don’t need to do like a 30 minutes in the gym if you just need 30 minute four days a week you know, that’s enough you know, but I’m 40 to 41 now so you know it’s not it’s a little bit harder but yeah, just I just do my usual weights and do a five kilometer run stay fresh and that’s it. It’s not harder if you people to sit down look at their phones around for like three hours in a row and they can’t go in a gym for 30 minutes. You just feel so much better. It’s consistent persistence and whatever. One thing else that rhyme with that.
Matt Zahab
I love it Jamie. What a treat man I had an absolute blast looking forward to meeting you in person on May 25th. Before we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Vulcan online and on social.
Jamie Thomson
Sure yeah, I mean the best way to start is twitter.com/vulcanforged from there you’ll find all our links for actually Discord if on Discord link there’s discord.gg/vulcanforged vulcanforged.com anything with Vulcan Forged in it you’ll find us just Google it you’ll get all the links you need.
Matt Zahab
Amazing. Jamie Oh, what about yourself, bro? You gotta you plug yourself come on.
Jamie Thomson
Oh yeah @jamiethomsonvf for Vulcan Forged on Twitter. I expect 100,000 followers from this podcast please Matt.
Matt Zahab
You got it Jamie what an episode appreciate you coming on man. Can’t wait for round two and proud of you and the team looking forward to meeting you guys in person on May 25th and, listeners we will include everything as always in the show notes.
Jamie Thomson
Thank you. Bye bye now.
Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Jamie Thomson CEO of Vulcan Forged he is dropping knowledge bombs left right and center we’d love to see that I will include everything in the show notes as always, I really hope you guys liked this one. I’m sure you did. And if you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I and speaking of the team love you guys Justas my amazing sound editor appreciate you as always and, the listeners love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy bye for now, and we’ll talk soon.
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