We zoom in on headlines, the world's biggest bank by market cap, JPMorgan announced a partnership with Coinbase to link customer accounts for crypto trading.
Now Trad by embracing crypto ETFs, stablecoins tokenize equities, and all that momentum may pick up speed with more regulatory clarity from the nation's capital.
Meanwhile, the blockchain gaming market is poised for massive growth from 13. billion dollars last year to over $300 billion by 2030, according to estimates.
Now driving that surge is demand for in-game asset ownership, decentralized platforms, as well as the rise of gaming metaverses with Asia Pacific leading the charge.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum segment leading the blockchain gaming market largely due to Ethereum's developer community, which focuses on building decentralized. and games.
Joining me this morning is Robbie Ferguson, co-founder and president of Immutable.
Robbie, happy Friday.
Thank you so much for joining me.
So first, the USSCC unveiling Project crypto to modernize securities regulations, and this comes on the heels of the passage of the Genius Act.
So do you think the US regulators are ahead of the rest of the world, or are they just catching up?
Certainly a year ago I would say they were middle of the pack.
I think what was unmistakably clear from today's announcement is the administration's previous stance was crypto was at the very best, something that should be highly regulated, and now it is they must be the leaders.
I mean, we've essentially gone from crypto is illegal to they want to make. the crypto capital of the world, I think it was pretty telling the quote that most crypto assets are not securities and the clarity that people can now get as to whether they are a digital collectible, a commodity, a stablecoin, or indeed a digital security.
I think it's going to allow a lot more people to deal with certainty inside the US.
Yeah, and Ray, while I have you here, how is this shift from traditional gaming to blockchain-based games actually changing the player ownership and also the control of what are known as in-game assets?
Most people don't realize how big gaming as a category is.
It's an industry that is bigger than music, movies and TV combined.
It's compounding at about 7% CAA, and 70% of those revenues come from not the ability to play games, but purchasing in-game digital goods, the skins or costumes in Fortnite or Minecraft or Roblox, about $150 billion US dollars every year.
Blockchain represents an opportunity to turn those into transactable assets where companies and players can actually earn royalties on secondary trades and where ultimately you can make a much fairer value equation for acquiring and engaging users than the $70 to $80 billion that's spent by games companies every year on Meta and Google to drive ads.
So that's one of the most exciting categories for me for blockchain is how will actually affect this already digital native economy.
Yeah, and for the lay person out there who's not familiar with this area, what role do gaming metaverses and also DI protocols actually play in creating new monetization opportunities for both developers as well as players?
Absolutely.
And first of all, the metaverse is already real.
Roblox has built a metaverse.
Minecraft has built a metaverse.
Really this is a word used to describe shared online communities and economies where people have persistent characters, identities, or goods.
All Blockchain is doing is making it far more efficient in the same way that you don't see Stripe branding itself a web free payment company, but you do see the Coulson brothers saying that stablecoins are at room temperature superconductors.
For financial infrastructure, we're going to see existing games incorporating this technology to have better engagement from players, better monetization, ultimately brand new monetization streams like the ability to take secondary market fees and royalties on a market cap of assets that they previously couldn't even access.
So it's a fundamental shift from renting assets where players cannot own any value to a shared economy where you can actually monetize off the back of this established secondary market cap.
And Robby, very quickly, Ethereum celebrated its 10th anniversary or its birthday earlier this week, but tell us what makes Ethereum the dominant blockchain platform for gaming and how does its developer community actually drive innovation in the space?
Really, I think this Ethereum was the first ever smart contract to enable blockchain.
You first had Bitcoin and it was essentially just currencies, and then Ethereum came along and said we can do the same thing, but we can apply decentralization to all computer logic.
And because of that you actually had the ability to have things like tokenized assets in the form of NFTs.
We've seen massive network effects and adoption and In particular, I think the whole industry has now shifted away from infrastructure and building for scale to commercialization, and we're going to very aggressively see over the next couple of years as this clarity from regulation comes into effect, major incumbents start to adopt this technology.
We're having conversations with Multiple public gaming companies about them launching tokens who incentivize their users.
We would have been laughed out of those conversations a year ago.
So the complete shift in cultural attitude from major incumbents toward adopting this technology for games and broadly for everything has been fairly fundamental overnight.
OK, Robby, well thank you so much for joining us and for informing us about some of the trends that are unfolding in this space.
Thank you.
