Journeys

Animoca CEO Robby Yung talks about his firm’s impressive investment portfolio and how he got into the Web3 industry.

The word Animoca doesnt exactly slip off the tongue when speaking English. Is it Japanese? Is it a type of sweet snack? Is it even a trendy type of coffee?

According to Robby Yung, the London-based CEO of Web3 investment behemoth Animoca Brands, it is neither of these things but rather a portmanteau that connects animation and mobile communication.

That means a focus on games and creating a Web3 environment that Animoca clearly wants to dominate. Whatever it means to outsiders, and however it sounds, it probably makes no difference to the company.

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The head of El Salvador’s new crypto commission started his Bitcoin journey in 2013 and continues it today.

It takes more than 10 hours to fly from El Salvador to Argentina, but Juan Carlos Reyes recent flight may be one of the most important of his life.

It may also have global significance, not that Reyes can reveal too much about it at the moment. 

The appointed President of El Salvadors newly created National Commission of Digital Assets (CNAD), Reyes has just returned from Buenos Aires after high-level meetings with Argentinas securities regulator, the National Securities Commission. 

Speaking exclusively to Magazine, he is in a cheery mood, albeit diplomatic, when talking of a potential collaboration between the two Bitcoin-friendly countries. 

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Hervé Larren’s crypto journey has taken him from luxury goods to Bitcoin mining and back full circle to the world of “blue-chip” NFTs.

During a period of hyperinflation in 2013, my Venezuelan mother asked me to send money to Caracas, the countrys capital, Herv Larren recalls. However, bank transfers were not possible between the two countries. 

Busy with work in New York, he told a friend that he planned to fly to Caracas carrying cash for his mother and return the same day. Why dont you just send Bitcoin? his friend asked, which quickly led to a change of plans as Larren made his first Bitcoin transfer.

My first crypto transaction, in 2013, was to wire Bitcoin from the U.S. to Venezuela. Due to the economic collapse, there was no functioning banking system between these two countries.

Switching from a career with luxury goods company LVMH Mot Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Larren co-founded a large-scale crypto mining operation and worked with Grayscale to bring crypto assets to old-school investors. He later became a key adviser to ApeCoin and the first person to bid a million dollars for a nonfungible token.

From old to new

We were reporting to Nicolas Sarkozy, and he was coming to our meetings, Larren recalls of his time as the head of a high school student council in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the wealthiest old-money suburb of Paris, where he grew up. 

Sarkozy served as the local mayor for 20 years before becoming the president of France. Larrens mother from Venezuela was a TV host and the first Latina model signed by the LOreal cosmetics brand. His French father imported wine to Canada,  where a third of the population is French-speaking.

In the late 90s, Larren began undergraduate business studies at Montreals Concordia University. In 2019, Concordia labeled him The Blockchain Maven as part of a 50 Under 50 alumni distinction. Upon graduation, he got a job at Mot Hennessys New York office, where he worked on brand development of the firms Hennessy cognac brand in the United States.

Larren worked on his MBA at Columbia University part time while at LVMH, graduating in 2010 and entering the venture capital world with Peak Ventures, which was involved in tech companies including Twitter. It was Larrens first experience in the technology sector, which he describes as very different from the old-world, intergenerational luxury goods industry.

Larren quickly moved to accept Bitcoin at an e-commerce business he was involved with, a company that helped charities raise money by partnering with celebrities. In 2015, he formed crypto mining firm Global Crypto Ventures, which grew into an operation of nearly 3,000 machines composed primarily of Bitmain Antminer S9 miners in Las Vegas and Texas, where the cost of infrastructure and electricity was cheaper. 

Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund 

While speaking at the 2017 World Technology Forum in New York, Larren met Digital Currency Group CEO Barry Silbert, who was talking right after him about the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, through which retail investors could get exposure to Bitcoin through their brokerage. He was also working on a new investment vehicle called Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund (GDLC), which represented a weighted portfolio of cryptocurrencies, including Ether, MATIC, ADA and SOL, in addition to Bitcoin. 

As a publicly traded investment instrument, it would require approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission. One relevant matter would be to ensure that the fund could buy its digital assets from a trusted source, preferably from within the United States. Larrens mining firm was an ideal source, and having a ready buyer for mining proceeds made business smoother.

This opportunity represented Larrens first foray into crypto beyond Bitcoin, and it attracted me to a new space.

Working with the SEC was no easy task, Larren recalls. It was a nerve-racking process. Though the company was very confident about getting approval, there was a lot of uncertainty because no such investment trust had been approved previously.

However, the GDLC was approved, expanding the potential pool of crypto investors. Though many in the industry continue to preach the not your keys, not your coins mantra, Larren argues that just as with stocks, owning Bitcoin and other crypto assets through a financial instrument instead of on an exchange or cold-storage device is preferable for most of the public.

There is less risk of being hacked or losing access to keys, and regulated funds must meet stringent security policies and often carry insurance. He also notes that they are easier to manage on a portfolio basis, particularly regarding taxation and being more straightforward for accountants to understand.

Will BlackRocks Bitcoin ETF be approved?

These advantages make it easy to see why heavyweights of the financial industry see an opportunity in offering Bitcoin investment vehicles accessible to retail investors. One of these is BlackRock, which recently applied to launch a Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund in the United States.

BlackRock offers the credibility to convince the SEC that the Bitcoin market can be operated safely and has much to offer investors, Larren says optimistically. He expects that with BlackRocks track record of 575 approved ETFs versus one denial, it will soon come online, with similar products expected in other markets.

I think it would lead to an automatic rise in Bitcoins price. I think many people are on the sidelines waiting for clarity, and thats a step in Bitcoins institutional adoption.

For a very long time, Grayscale had a premium on its shares compared with the price of Bitcoin, Larren notes, explaining that the security, certainty and convenience meant that more conservative investors were historically willing to pay more per BTC. BlackRocks ETF is unlikely to hold a large premium, which would serve to make the market more efficient.

All roads in Decentraland lead to Beeple

Larren first heard about the metaverse through Decentralands initial coin offering in August 2017. They were selling 90,000 pieces of NFT land in the metaverse, he recalls, adding that he felt a proximity to the projects Argentine founders due to South Americas shared currency issues. My first NFT purchase was actually buying my name in the metaverse, he says, recalling how he spent 100 MANA to name his avatar.

He was also given a piece of land on which to build the Airvey art gallery, where Larren placed various NFTs for sale. When Christies announced it would auction Beeples Everydays piece in its first-ever NFT auction in March 2021 a story previously covered by Magazine the auction house contacted the Airvey gallery to invite bids.

I wanted to be the first person in the world who bid seven figures on an NFT.

Well that escalated quickly was Beeples only comment when Larrens bid for $1 million came through, representing the first volley in a bidding battle that would see an anonymous buyer later revealed as Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as Metakovan, beat Tron founder Justin Sun with a record-setting bid of $69 million.

Bored Apes design ApeCoin

With a newfound passion for NFTs, Larren joined Horizen Labs in 2021, months before the firm began discussions with Yuga Labs, a small company where four founders were working on an NFT project involving monkeys.

Yuga contracted Horizen Labs to create ApeCoin, a large allocation of which was distributed to holders of Yugas NFT collections including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Bored Ape Kennel Club via massive airdrop. 

We did everything from the white paper, tokenomics, to listing on exchanges. In less than 20 minutes, it became an $8 billion project, Larren says, referring to the tokens undiluted market cap, now about $2 billion. In addition to the launch, Larren notes that Horizen Labs designed the tokens staking mechanism, which will see 100 million tokens distributed to the community over three years.

As Gucci and TAG Heuer began accepting ApeCoin as a form of payment, Larrens luxury contacts came calling back.

I spent a week with Chanels team at a castle in the English countryside, educating them on all aspects of Web3, including MetaMask and NFT drops. Larren observes that as he moved from the most successful physical goods company, LVMH, to the most successful digital goods company, Yuga Labs, the thought process was the same.

He describes metaverse real estate and PFPs, which include Yugas famous monkey pictures, as fitting into a broad category of consumer NFTs that are purchased by individuals in a way not dissimilar to luxury goods. Indeed, he notes that many of LVMH founder Bernard Arnaults children heirs of the worlds second-richest man are actively dabbling in them.

People want to feel that they are part of an exclusive community with like-minded individuals, he explains, relating the concept sold in luxury boutiques and exclusive events the world over. In the case of Yugas NFTs, he argues that there is value for many people in being members of a group that shares similar cultural references, whether it being digital or at concerts, referring to events like ApeFest, the next of which will take place in Hong Kong in November.

Can an ape JPG really be a blue-chip NFT?

NFTs that gain mass appeal as recognizable status symbols are often labeled as blue chip among the NFT community, a nod to a term typically referring to reliable stocks and originally derived from poker, where blue chips are traditionally the most valuable. 

Its a brand-building element as recognition of industry and buyers. Supply is far less than demand, and there is a strong fan and collector base. In traditional art, Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat are blue chips, he explains, noting that Bored Apes and CryptoPunks hold such a position within the PFP hierarchy.

The price is a result of the value that has been created. When you go to a Louis Vuitton store, the price is nowhere to be seen.

Holding a BAYC can make sense because you can stake it to earn tokens, and it can act as a financial instrument because you can borrow against it, he notes, naturally enough, considering his company designed the staking mechanism. 

There are blue chips in other categories as well, such as metaverse land, he adds, cautioning that its value, like traditional real estate, will depend on the income generated with it. 

This is because, in his opinion, people will not remain interested in vast spaces of empty metaverse land but rather in spaces that are built up and useful, like his art gallery. Traditional real estate involves buildings the same will be true of metaverse land.

Where might we look for the next crop of blue chips?

Im now passionate about building on top of Bitcoin with BRC-20s and Ordinals, Larren explains, hinting that something big is in the works. For him, the coming metaverse is a place and time when your digital life is more important than your physical life and where digital image matters more than physical image. In this new environment, he believes that the Bitcoin chain, with its newfound capability to host NFTs, will hold a key position as a central pillar.

In Web3, you need to anticipate how consumer taste will evolve and what the market will want in the next six months.

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Clara Bullrich helps run a $54B investment fund, a women-only DAO and she founded a gaming guild to teach gamers in Latin America play to earn.

Clara Bullrich must have cloned herself or possibly invoked dark forces that shouldnt be meddled with. Somehow, shes managed to cram about four careers into one life.

Her main gig is leading her own financial entity, AlTi, managing a whopping investment fund, which grew to $54 billion under management following a recent merger. Thats a big enough job in itself.

A member of Women in Blockchain, she also runs a women-only DAO, Komorebi, that concentrates on funding female and non-gender-specific projects.

Ive seen in crypto that theres very few women, and I really want to push that as much as I can, she says. For me, its always important to have skin in the game.

And if that wasnt enough, shes also the founder of a gaming guild, Ola Guild Games (OlaGG), that hopes to upskill the quarter of a billion mobile gamers in Latin America so they can boost their incomes using play-to-earn blockchain games. 

She tells Magazine she feels lucky to have been involved with cryptocurrencies, DAOs and the metaverse at this early stage.

My sons are nine and 11 and will live through the entire cycle of what blockchain and crypto are creating right now. And I feel super hopeful around that.

Hailing from Argentina, after studying in the United States and Ireland, she worked for a short time for the Spanish Santander bank in the United States. She didnt stay there long. Laboring in the stuffy, conventional world of traditional finance clearly does not float her boat. Her favorite word is disruptive.

Bitcoin is just money supported by math. I came across it about seven years ago. At first, I was very uncomfortable with that, then I thought: The big disruptions are the ones you should walk towards.

Disruptive innovation

After a short stint at Santander, she was headhunted by an Argentine tech company called Collective Mind, which grew rapidly. Then in 2000, she started a family office business for high-net-worth clients under the umbrella of Guggenheim Partners. In those days, family offices werent as prevalent as today.

Over 23 years, she expanded her operations from Latin America to other parts of the world. Three years ago, this fund management business became Alvarium Investment Advisors, managing over $20 billion in investments, then recently merged with two other companies to form Alvarium Tiedemann Holdings, AlTi, with over $54 billion under management.

Bullrich had some challenges persuading her clients to invest in disruptive technology, including Bitcoin, but first, she had to persuade her colleagues of the merits of investing in progress rather than simple money-making schemes. 

My discussions with my partners were very much around: We should be investing in tech with tech expertise, not financial expertise. 

Her intention was to back technology that would have beneficial effects in the longer term, rather than simply looking at a financial balance sheet.

She set up the Digital Assets Committee at Alvarium Tiedemann in 2019.

What you have to realize is that most people there are traditional investors, so the idea of crypto, blockchain, Web3, digital assets these were really foreign to them.

She continues, And so being able to start that committee has allowed me to educate traditional investors about the potential of digital assets and blockchain technology. She continues, I wanted to create that level of expertise to be able to understand trends, why certain disruptions make more sense than others.

She feels the mindset required is more technological and over a longer time span than in conventional finance. This led, in 2016, to her second company, which is called The Venture City.

The Venture City is an accelerator to nurture innovative projects, so it has the financial backing, expertise and support to reach its potential.

A major impetus behind TVC is to improve access to financial products and services. In some Latin American countries, up to 60%70% of people do not have bank accounts, restricting their ability to improve their situation. Bullrich sees TVCs investments as a means of combining technology and financial expertise with a beneficial social product.

We have already 100 companies who passed through the accelerator, and were actually starting Fund 3. So, we did Fund 1 with $52 million, Fund 2 with $75 [million], and were going in 2023 with the launch of Fund 3. It was an amazing experience. Because very early on, we were talking about community and creating a lot of events and educational sessions around the products.

Here are some examples of the many projects The Venture City has invested in:

Sturdy Exchange: Sturdy.Exchange is an NFT-based Web3 token in the Flow ecosystem. It aims to decentralize music distribution. It is a platform for artists, musicians and entertainers to reach their audiences with a new form of ownership and utility using NFTs. 

Belo: A wallet app that uses Argentine pesos and crypto with a DeFi yield platform built in so users can receive regular returns. It aims to be an accessible cryptocurrency introduction.

Gamer Safe: This is an app to make online multiplayer gaming safer and more pleasant, by removing cheaters, fake and duplicated accounts, and policing toxicity and dishonesty in games. 

Women in Blockchain

She joined Women in Blockchain (WiB) last year and hopes to develop womens skills, opportunities and aspirations in the cryptocurrency sector.

We are providing that platform where women can meet and be part of those conversations and move forward in terms of education, she says. We can become connectors of people needing a certain kind of expertise and people with that expertise can link up with those who need it.

So, WiBs a completely different animal from my Venture City, which is doing that deep dive looking for companies and deciding what companies the fund is going to invest in.

Diversity in DAOs

Komorebi is a poetic, almost untranslatable, Japanese expression that describes sunlight filtering through trees. It is also a DAO on the Syndicate Protocol, dedicated to increasing diversity and breaking down barriers to entry in the blockchain space.

The thought process behind this was that women-led startups receive only 2.3% of venture funding but perform 63% better than investments with all-male founding teams, according to Venture Capital firm First Round.

My involvement with Komorebi allows me to support and amplify the voices of women in tech and finance. Im grateful I didnt have as many hurdles of being a woman in finance, but I encountered them more in technology. So, whats crucial for me here is being able to find an opportunity to help women find their voice in blockchain and crypto.

She says adding more diversity to the crypto and blockchain world is a win-win for everyone.

Im not saying womens voices should be dominant over men; its not one or the other. What I truly believe is having diverse perspectives and experiences in decision-making leads to better outcomes, and my role is to provide an additional platform for women to showcase their passion, their vision.

When Bullrich finds a project that interests her team, she brings it to the DAO and everyone votes on whether to back it or not. The DAO is a very interesting angle for allowing people to be part of something bigger, rather than just putting money into it.

Final boss: Making a living in a poor country with P2E

Yield and Ola Guild Games: These are DAOs. Yield Guild Games (YGG) was founded by Gabby Dizon and Beryl Li in 2018 to involve Filipino players in gaming and cryptocurrency. The players can supplement their incomes with P2E winnings. OlaGG is a subDAO, which expands the successful concept geographically to the Hispanic market: Spain, Latin America outside Brazil and Hispanics in the United States.

The idea of Ola Guild Games is to create social and financial inclusion for the Hispanic Community through gaming. Its main platform is Axie Infinity, but there are options to engage with other P2E game systems as well. The concept took off in the Philippines during the pandemic, with users supplementing their tightened budgets or even multiples of the average wage with P2E gaming.

It seems like a good fit as one-third of Hispanic speakers income is $1.90 per day, which the United Nations defines as extreme poverty. Nearly half have no access to banking or financial products. However, more than 58% of the population in Latin America play mobile games, which equates to a user base of over 273 million people.

So, the idea of Ola is how can we engage with people, teach them, educate them on these new tools for Web3 to really create that financial inclusion. It might be through games, and that will be play-to-earn. 

The Guild is also creating educational programs learn-to-earn where users receive payment for educational achievements with the intention of having an employment structure, for example, in games development, to move on to when trained.

Conventional western aid purveyors will probably have heart attacks when they find developing countries blockchain-gaming their way up the development ladder, instead of subsisting on aid packages with strings attached.

While it does have a huge and clearly defined audience, the project is still in its early stages.

Co-founding Ola and working with my team in Latin America represents my desire to give back and provide opportunities in a market that does not have access to the same resources as we have here in the U.S., she says. I want to provide all that education Im seeing here on Web3, structuring DAOs, and help them adopt those technologies and bring it to life. Its not just a nice to have, its a must-have for Latin America.

By sharing my experiences and knowledge of Web3 and decentralized organizations, I hope to bring positive change to my home country [Argentina].

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Kieran Warwick created the play-to-earn game Illuvium with his brothers Aaron and Grant all siblings of DeFi maverick Kain, the founder of Synthetix. He shares his alpha on how NFT game mechanics can be designed in such a way that playing them can be fun and profitable in the long term.

Warwick entered the retail world right out of high school, eventually becoming an online shopping entrepreneur. He got his start in the crypto world at brother Kains company BlueShyft, which first made Bitcoin and crypto exchange payments available over-the-counter at more than one thousand physical retailers around Australia in 2015.

Years later, with a number of business projects under his belt, Kain encouraged him to reenter the space, which led to the creation of Illuvium, a Pokemon-like play-to-earn NFT game. Unlike contemporaries such as Axie Infinity, which experienced dramatic in-game inflation, Warwick believes Illuvium will have a decade of staying power. In June 2022, the game brought in $72 million through the sale of 20,000 plots of NFT land, laying the literal groundwork for what Warwick envisions as a longstanding playing field.

Designing deflation

He explains the setup of Illuvium. When players first arrive or crash onto the planet, they find out that theres this society thats been built, and its your job to be a hunter and to go out and catch creatures known as Illuvials.

Like Pokemon cards, these Illuvials, which live in certain regions of the map, are limited edition. And much like the original 1999 Charizard or Pikachu cards, Genesis Illuvials are no longer available. Whenever a new set of Illuvials becomes available, they get progressively more difficult to find and capture based on a bonding curve comparable to the one that governs Bitcoins halvings and makes Bitcoins progressively rarer and more difficult to capture by way of mining. Thats what makes them valuable, Warwick notes.

In addition to being limited in mintage and increasingly difficult to mine, Illuvials are deflationary due to a game mechanic termed Fusing, which consists of destroying lower-level characters to create higher levels.

Three level-one Illuvials can fuse into a single level-two version, whereas summoning a level-three Illuvial requires a sacrifice of three level-twos, equivalent to nine basic creatures that are forever removed from circulation.

Warwick is quick to note that the capped and deflationary nature of his Illuvial game pieces makes Illuvium the polar opposite of Axie Infinity, whose native Axie characters are created through a mechanism called breeding that produces an ever-inflating pool of characters within the game universe.

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A single Axie cost hundreds of dollars in mid-2021 to the extent that individual gamers often rented them from owners and split their earnings but have now crashed in value to almost nothing. This price plunge can be explained by the runaway breeding of more Axies, which also caused possible earnings per Axie to fall.

Warwick is not surprised by the downfall of Axie Infinitys game economy. Ive been calling this for 18 months now, he says, explaining that he believes the game was doomed from the beginning, as its economics were unsustainable. The model attracted many players who worked full-time to extract value from the game, while few added any, he asserts.

Many people are finding that these games are smoke and mirrors. We are not that we are here for 10 years at the least.

Retail

Having held an interest in business from a young age, Warwick, now 32, reasoned that he wanted to start earning money right out of high school in 2007 and decided to skip college in favor of Australian retailer Harvey Norman, where he eventually became a franchisee responsible for running a store.

After leaving in 2012, he founded Audio Invasion, a competing online retailer for music and computing goods with his brother Kain and a mutual friend whod recently begun mining Bitcoin as a hobby. Around this same time, he dabbled in a business selling online tutorials.

That was the first I heard of Bitcoins he had hundreds of BTC, Warwick recalls, adding that the friend who introduced him to Bitcoin had tragically passed away in a biking accident, taking his private keys to the grave with him, like so many other early adopters who met untimely deaths.

When Audio Invasion ran out of money in 2014, Warwick worked as head of marketing for BlueShyft, a financial payments and retail network he founded with his brother Kain and billed as the first in the world over-the-counter exchange, which saw over 1,000 retail locations around Australia becoming outfitted with an iPad, with which customers could directly purchase BTC in-store. In short, anyone could walk in with cash and have BTC deposited to the address of their choice. In addition to the retail business, the company today operates bitcoin.com.au, billing itself as the fastest way to buy Bitcoin in Australia.

In 2017, Kierans brother Kain, who is nine years older than him, founded Synthetix (originally Havven) an Ethereum-based DeFi platform. Kieran helped his brother raise money for the project. Around this time, Warwick started investing in Ether and other cryptocurrencies back when the price of ETH was in the single digits.

I was a little skeptical of crypto I had lost $30,000 margin trading ETH, which left a bad taste.

Instead of flipping crypto, the younger Warwick tapped into his taste for burgers in 2016 to create the Burger Collective, described as an app made for burger lovers that hosted reviews and discounts to nearby restaurants. With 200,000 users, the app experienced initial success and an imminent integration with DoorDash, before the COVID-19 pandemic caused restaurants to close for in-person dining. Our product was all about going to the store, Warwick explains regarding why the company had to wind down in May 2021 after running out of money.

It was while his burger app was beginning to fail that Kain peer-pressured him to get back into crypto, even loaning him $100,000 to do so. I ended up making a whole bunch of money 10x in six months, Warwick recalls. In June 2020, he had the fortune of learning about the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which fascinated him.

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They branded it as a Pokmon-like game, and I am an avid Pokmon fan, he notes regarding the initial appeal, which led him down a rabbit hole of learning about NFTs, upon which the game was based. Describing himself as a gamer, Warwick came to the view that this is exactly what the mainstream gaming world has been asking for decades.

What if we made a AAA Fortnite-like title? Thats exactly what gamers have been wanting! Warwick opined, a realization followed by what he describes as a couple of weeks of deeper research into the technology and possible game functions.

What goes into designing a game? Designing game characters seems like a natural place to begin, so Warwick went to work to convince his more artistically inclined brother Grant to help out with design. Getting Grant on board was no easy task, however.

Nah man, I wont go into crypto its all scams, so I cant put reputation on the line, Kieran recalls of his brothers protests. He eventually relented and agreed to design five characters.

Five designed characters do not a game make. Though Warwick imagined himself capable of raising money and running the business side of things, he knew little about how to build a game a task that involves much more than mere artistic design.

The answer came in the form of yet another member of the Warwick clan, Aaron. Hes an accomplished game designer and was next in line to join the team. Aaron brought new ideas to the table, preferring more team fight tactics, League of Legends-style.

Being brothers, we just couldnt agree on game mechanics we were arguing for 23 days until Aaron designed a beta version. Thats how Illuvium came about.

“Were a game with Crypto elements rather than gamified crypto. The result of that gaming DNA is high quality gameplay that feels no different to the best of traditional gaming,” Warwick explains regarding the resulting first-hand gaming experience.

How to earn

There are a number of ways by which players can earn while playing Illuvium. The first of these is through capturing Illuvials in the wilderness, which can later be sold for a profit. This process is not without expenses, however, as players must expend in-game Fuel to travel into a specific region where Illuvials might be present and, upon encountering one, expend a shard in order to facilitate the capture. There are several tiers of shards, which cost progressively more, and the capture of a highly ranked Illuvial with a low-level shard is statistically unlikely. Fuel is what powers the entire economy in Illuvium, he says.

There is also Illuvium Zero, a mobile companion game, which Warwick describes as a city builder with NFT land. Owners of the land can earn Fuel, which is linked to the Illuvium economy as an integral resource needed to effectively play the game. According to Warwick, land owners make 5% of in-game revenue in this manner. As of writing, the cheapest individual land plots trade for close to 1,000 USDT on the in-game marketplace.

Ranked battles are a driver of the demand of captured Illuvials, where they can be battled in order to climb the leaderboards and earn ILV governance tokens, of which 1 million are set aside as rewards for achievements such as tournaments. In these cases, the DAO that governs the game takes a small percentage. With a market capitalization north of $100 million, ILV sits in the top 200 cryptocurrencies. In addition to the governance-focused ILV token, which is in some ways comparable to Axie Infinitys AXS token in terms of function, there is sILV2.

SILV2 is our in-game currency, but its finite as well, Warwick says, explaining these tokens are commonly used to buy the all-important Fuel. The 2 in the name is the result of a January 2022 incident, in which the currency was exploited by a hacker just prior to launch.

Their plan was to wait until the game started and have an unlimited amount of SLV, Warwick explains, saying that the brothers decided to relaunch the token and make victims whole by personally putting up about $450,000. It was really Warwicks money, however, as the other guys arent liquid yet, but they said theyll pay me back, he says.

Warwick has a wider vision for the future of blockchain gaming.

I think most games will migrate to Web3, he says with confidence, explaining that the advantages of the new paradigm that is giving power back to the players are so numerous as to make it a necessary upgrade due to consumer demand. Unlike in most mainstream games where players cannot generally sell their in-game items or monetize their achievements, Web3 gaming means that consumers have a choice.

Its the beginning of a new cycle, and consumers will have the power in this 1020-year period.

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Scott Melker, better known as The Wolf of All Streets, is a trader and crypto advocate who is far more approachable than his online handle might suggest. A former DJ, Melker operates a small crypto advocacy empire spanning YouTube videos, podcasts and a popular newsletter.

Scott Melker is open about his initial intentions in the crypto industry. I simply came to trade and make money, he admits, getting involved after hearing friends go on about the gold-paved streets of the blockchain world where 100x weekly returns were common. Being familiar with the more conservative movements of the stock markets since childhood, Melker was lucky to learn proper trading before entering the unregulated crypto casino.

XRP was like a penny or something then, he recalls. Crypto was also popular in the DJ community, something Melker attributes to the communitys risk-taking nature. He attributes his success to lucky timing in early 2016, soon cashing out his initial investment to play with his winnings.

There was this sort of groundswell in the DJ community. They understand technology, and they’re kind of wild and speculative. That’s how I first discovered it.

The crypto beats stopped soon enough. The 2018 bear market meant that If you wanted to stick around, you really had to justify it to yourself, and you probably went way further down the rabbit hole to understand the importance of the movement, Melker explains. He began to truly appreciate Bitcoins fundamentals and understand the purpose of individual altcoins.

Trading

Though Melker has invested in hundreds of tokens over the years, he believes that Bitcoin is the most important asset ever created and that everyone should strive to have some exposure to it. Ether rises nearly to Bitcoins level of importance and may well have more upside, he says, while altcoins are akin to individual speculative technology investments.

Soon after changing his Twitter tune from music to crypto in 2017, Melker connected with Christopher Inks of TexasWest Capital, who became a mentor to him. Melker became something of an analyst for Inks fund, sharing charts and trading ideas. He clarifies that he did not trade anyone elses money, and lacks licenses to do so.

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The Wolf emphasizes that trading is not easy, whether in stocks or crypto. To trade full time for decades, you are like a unicorn, he explains, adding that the crypto markets are especially brutal because they operate 24/7, without pause, meaning that traders dont have an opportunity to recharge while markets are closed. Of course, you dont need to trade all the time Melker himself uses leverage to trade Bitcoin only two or three times per year.

A curious aspect of trading is that as ones portfolio grows, so do the sizes of bets one should make to remain profitable doing otherwise would be akin to taking out $10,000 in casino chips only to spend all evening making $1 bets.

When your portfolio reaches a certain size, you have to be willing to ratchet up the size of your trades as a percentage and those numbers can start to become uncomfortably big.

Learning to fail

Melker is quick to point out that the odds are stacked against day traders. 95% of traders fail they go bust quickly, Melker states, explaining that those aspiring to be serious traders need to be prepared to lose their invested assets several times over. Most dont have the time or capital for that, he says. In 2012, Melker invested his entire portfolio into ARYx Therapeutics, which went to zero. Despite such setbacks, Melker counts himself lucky for learning the hard lessons before crypto. He finds that most who first discover trading via cryptocurrency tend to lose everything to leverage.

You have to be able to learn on the job and go broke multiple times and still stick with it.

Though Investors almost always do better than traders, Melker strongly recommends those determined to trade study up on risk management. Long-term profitability, he explains, is not about selling tops and buying bottoms but rather the way that you protect your capital and allow yourself to hit home runs. He uses the example that a trader can be right less than half the time and remain wildly profitable if they know when to cut their losses. Even one win out of 10 can be a recipe for success.

It’s a math game of taking small losses and big wins.

Another piece of advice is to never risk more than 1% of ones portfolio on a single trade. However, this is far from foolproof. For example, 30% of a portfolio could be spread over 30 altcoin positions, all of which suffer when Bitcoin takes an unexpected dive. Ego is the enemy, and emotional attachment to positions is to be avoided something that may be even harder when it comes to NFTs.

To stay profitable long term is largely a result of your risk management strategy, Melker claims.

DJ Bitcoin

Melker, 45, grew up in Gainesville, Florida, where his parents hammered home the importance of financial literacy and investing and saving. He began to experiment with the stock market at 13 when he bought stocks in Disney with his fathers help. He headed for the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, where he majored in anthropology. The school was very business-focused, Melker explains, with consulting and investment banking firms recruiting a large number of graduating students. The late 90s, of course, coincided with the dot-com boom, and It was impossible to avoid excitement around financial markets at school like that, Melker recounts. He adds that there was an up only sentiment that is familiar in crypto circles.

Apparently I once had a goatee. This was 2007. Steve Aoki took this photo. At the time, he was transitioning from being open format DJ Kid Millionaire to his present EDM identity. The first song he played that night was Sexyback. #TBT pic.twitter.com/9bN4n5bHbq

— The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) October 10, 2019

Having taken piano lessons from a young age, Melker was consumed by music and began working as a DJ alongside completing his studies. This began with house parties, which soon led to him playing gigs at downtown nightclubs. In those days, DJing involved far more skill and investment than today, when someone can simply hook up a laptop to a sound system. This was the full vinyl era. I had to have four friends travel with me anywhere I went to carry all the equipment, he recounts. Hot girls thought it was cooler than the piano, he says with a laugh.

Despite having the option to follow his peers into investment banking after graduation, Melker decided on the entrepreneurial route, founding nightlife startup Philly2Nite in 1999, which marketed events happening in the Philadelphia area. In 2001, he founded 101 Magazine, which he describes as a lifestyle rag a magazine for everything that was happening in Philadelphia, along with the sort of snarky content the likes of which I now post about crypto. The magazine was a success and eventually merged into the larger Frank Magazine, which saw Melker move to New York as the firms global brand ambassador in 2003.

He worked for various other companies, including as a music director and business developer and a short stint in marketing at Vice Magazine. Melker moved to Miami in 2012, where he worked as a realtor, only to return to Gainesville in 2017 to be closer to his parents after having children of his own.

Throughout his career, Melker continued to perform and produce music under names such as The Melker Project, Funkontrol and MBS. Over the years, this resulted in him gaining a significant 40,000 followers on Twitter.

One day, I stopped talking about music and began posting charts and talking about magic internet money.

As he continued endlessly posting about crypto, he saw his Twitter following drop by half. But soon, new engagement began to appear. When you want to go from one thing to another, people tend to dismiss it, Melker states. He explains that in his early days of crypto, he faced mean-spirited comments like Shut up, DJ when he brought up crypto.

Thats when Melker came up with his Wolf of All Streets moniker as a message to people that you can be more than one thing. The name stuck, and he takes care to point out that it was merely a play on words, that the real Wolf of Wall Street was a criminal and not someone he wants to emulate.

$BTC Dominance

Here is some Grade A China White Hopium.

Every time RSI (which is a meme on dominance, really) has been this overbought on Bitcoin Dominance, we have a massive altcoin run.

Not saying it will happen, just showing you what has happened in the same situation. pic.twitter.com/pog7VclA0K

— The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) May 28, 2022

I become hyper-focused on that thing, and everything else disappears, Melker explains regarding his sudden turn from music to crypto. Like previous Journeys interviewee Carl The Moon Runefelt, Melker has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD. Theres a lot of ADHD in crypto, he says, explaining that he considers it a superpower because it allows him to place total focus on his passion.

I followed all the big accounts. I was trying to learn, I was commenting under their tweets, trying to engage with them. This engagement could soon be seen in his follower count, and Melker grew more confident in sharing his ideas. Considering Twitter very shorthand, he started writing a newsletter, which soon came to resemble a full-time job. He was charging $15 per month and offering a limited free version, but he later made everything free because I dont want to monetize my audience in any way, shape or form.

By all appearances, Melker is driven more by passion than money. This did not, however, prevent controversy from blowing up last year amid a market downturn when he was criticized for deleting so-called shill tweets relating to low-market-cap coins whose price could theoretically have been influenced by a highly visible account like his. My account has grown to a size where I cannot tweet about certain things, he commented following the controversy. He says the blow-up resulted in threats against his family.

I used to hang out with a lot of celebrities in my DJ days. pic.twitter.com/92ylU3d3Lz

— The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) February 25, 2022

The newsletters success prompted Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks, to approach Melker and suggest he start a podcast. I literally asked, Whats a podcast? as I had never listened to one, Melker recalls with a laugh. Today, he considers podcasting the best job in the world, partly because he feels he can get almost anyone onto The Wolf Of All Streets Podcast.

With multiple sponsors, the show has become a business but not one devoid of purpose. The overarching goal, Melker says, is to create content for the next wave of crypto investors, like grandma or the average person on the street. He sees himself as a crypto advocate, easily able to list the ways Bitcoin and crypto proliferation will benefit society. Considering the breadth of his YouTube channel, Twitter account, newsletter, website and podcast which are full of thoughtful, measured commentary its clear that new followers will have no shortage of support.

I wake up every morning at 4:30, excited to write the newsletter. I can’t sleep because of the thoughts that I want to get down on paper.

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