In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Laguna Labs’ CEO Aron Beierschmitt about leaving behind debut game Crypto Unicorns and moving to new project Neo Olympus, which is a fully onchain game using the MUD engine and running on the B3 blockchain, with assets on Ethereum and Base.
Last time we spoke it was to discuss your debut game Crypto Unicorns, so can you tell us what’s happening with that?
Aron Beierschmitt: Yeah, it’d be impossible in a 30 minute interview to really go through everything that went wrong, and right, with Crypto Unicorns. Ultimately, we failed to inflect growth. We worked for many years on it, and even with the Xai migration, we just could not see the project inflect growth.
I think a major and very humbling lesson I learned is that once you let these token economies out of the bag, it is impossible to stuff them back in. The combination of a rough launch with six weekly red candles to the cycle bottom, ETH at 800 bucks, crypto is dead… that combination really set us off on the wrong foot. We struggled to recover momentum after that.
Something that’s been embedded in the small team that remains now, is how we have to set the dominoes up with Neo Olympus and make sure each one falls into the next one. Otherwise, the sequence is broken.
So obviously, it’s been a rough year for all things Crypto Unicorns. We had the migration occur, and not lead to growth. Then we had a very brutal bear market that just ended in a point where the treasury no longer had the funds to continue to support the Laguna Games team. So we went through a massive layoff, which Laguna Labs is effectively born out of. We went from over 90 people to 10.
On the positive side of this, the DAO still exists. The Crypto Unicorns DAO still has nearly a million ETH in it, and it’s completely community controlled now. Laguna Labs is simply there to hand it off to whoever steps up to take control. They’re in the middle of electing the new governance council right now. It’s been really promising to see not only community members remain, but actually work to find a path forward.
Several groups are competing, where one group wants to reboot some form of the game, one group wants to pull a Pudgy Penguins and go very NFT IP focused, and another group’s hybrid somewhere between the two.
Again it’s a terrible situation that I’ll always accept all the blame for, both the failure and the success of the project, but I am optimistic about a path forward.
The last thing I’ll say is that nothing would make me happier than to have the community succeed where I failed. Very few projects have the infrastructure set up to even do what we did. The DAO legitimately owns the IP, Laguna does not. I convinced my investors to sign over the IP we created to the DAO, the token holders.
What sparked the concept of your new project Neo Olympus?
Gods of Olympus, which was the original working title for Neo Olympus has been a project that we’ve had at Laguna Games since we started in 2020. So well before even the crypto pivot.
It’s had a bunch of different iterations and names. Kingdoms Forever was actually the publishing deal that we closed with WB Games. That was the spiritual predecessor to what Gods of Olympus would be. The ultimate irony is when I raised the seed fund, I had a pitch deck for Gods of Olympus and not one for Crypto Unicorns. A lot of our seed investors bet on us being a multi-project team from the beginning.
The cool light bulb moment though was the shift in the IP, because originally it was very generic Greek heroes as you would envision them to be. The pivot to the gods being mecha or mechs, and the titans being Kaiju and controlling monsters, and that spin on Greek fiction, was a real light bulb moment in the creative process. Most have heard of Hercules, Artemis, and Zeus, but haven’t seen what a Zeus or Hercules mech would look like – and they look awesome.
Like Crypto Unicorns, Neo Olympus is a fully onchain game, so you clearly think that’s the sweet spot for blockchain?
Absolutely. Crypto Unicorns was very onchain, but still had a server for all the gameplay and the breeding operations and things of that nature. A major lesson we learned is how hard it is to build a successful hybrid gaming experience. I did make fun of the fully onchain games people for a while, thinking they were a little too philosophical with this autonomous worlds and stuff.
Our approach comes from having live operated a web2.5 game for three years, and the struggles of that. I believe you can only be successful in the space building fully onchain now. I think if you’re going to be a crypto native game and have assets and things you benefit from the trustless, transparent nature of it being fully onchain.
Crypto Unicorns wouldn’t be around today if it wasn’t fully onchain. There would have been no AWS server bill to keep it going, no server infrastructure team to support it. It would continue operating so long as the blockchain it’s on operates, and from that principle alone, fully onchain is the only way to build. If you’re going to make a commitment to building a long-term, sustainable economic network, it has to be fully onchain.
You’re going with B3, a fairly new blockchain based on Base. How did you end up with those guys?
Darryl and I have worked together before. He was on the Coinbase wallet team and we did one of the first Crypto Unicorns promos way back in the day. We kept up through the years and when he spun out of the Coinbase team and started building B3, I wanted to talk to him.
The thing that resonated with me is how they’re trying to build an ecosystem of game chains. You want your game chain to be fast and cheap. You do not want the noisy neighbor problem of some new contract meaning your game transactions suddenly get more expensive. You want interoperability. Game devs do not want to be siloed to a specific chain, they simply want access to players and liquidity across the EVM. So Darryl’s freaking everybody out because he’s so open to us being fully interoperable with other chains. This means players will be able to play Neo Olympus from Arbitrum, Abstract, and Ronin when it goes permissionless, without bridging.
In fact, we’re building on Arbitrum Orbit tech because that’s the fastest and cheapest chain you can run right now.
Parallel has also announced they’re building a game chain in the B3 ecosystem. The secret or not so secret sauce is they’re using Sigma, which is an interoperability protocol that allows for seamless cross-chain messaging. Players who are playing Parallel will be able to play Neo Olympus without bridging to our chain. Bridge friction is a killer, so avoiding that entirely via this interop player is a very smart move.
Another example is most of our NFTs will get minted on Base itself, because there’s more liquidity there. And obviously you’ve got a big OpenSea deployment there, and you don’t have to bridge the NFTs to our game chain to play, you’ll simply play the game and as you mint new NFTs, they’re on Base ready for you to trade.
What got me really excited was the legitimate ecosystem of game chains that they’re trying to build combined with Interop tech from Sigma. It aligns very closely with my vision of where I see the space going.
In terms of tech, can you explain the ERC404 token standard and how it allows you to do ERC20 and ERC721 within the same smart contract?
DN404s as ‘memecoins meet NFTs’ is a good way of thinking about it. In simple terms, Prime Cores for Neo Olympus are a DN404 collection, and that’s what we’re minting in January. With Prime Cores, if you have one fungible token in your wallet, we automatically drop an NFT into your wallet, and that represents the Prime Core itself, which you can use to activate a Realm Forge. You can have up to seven Prime Cores per Realm Forge. DN404 allows native fractionalization so you could hold 0.5 of a Prime Core token. You won’t have the NFT, it’ll be chilling in the DEX pool, technically. But if you get to one or two or three whole numbers of these Prime Cores, you have the mirrored NFT in your wallet. And if you choose to transfer one Prime Core fungible token to another wallet, that NFT follows it.
This enables a reroll feature. So by selling a chunk of your Prime Core fungible token to the DEX and then buying it back, it allows you to reroll the metadata and traits of your Prime Core. This allows you to try to achieve a higher tier Prime Core over time. To optimize the collection of Prime Cores you have to maximize your elemental resource generation and synergy bonuses in the Realm Forge.
With this we’re trying to gamify the experience of NFT collection, where you have a common Prime Core and every reroll gives you a chance at higher tiers and better metadata and stats. That creates a volume in the decks, which drives LP fee revenue, of which a huge chunk is used for buyback and burn to keep the economy spinning.
It definitely adds another dynamic. And you can choose to go on OpenSea and buy a Mythic Prime Core. There will only ever be roughly 77 of those, depending on the RNG. They’re incredibly rare relative to the total collection size of 7,777. So it’s going to be interesting to see that play out. Prime Cores will be on ETH mainnet, by the way. So that’s going to be an exciting opportunity to maybe help make Ethereum great again.
On the economics side of things, you mentioned a buyback and burn mechanic. Can you explain more?
It’s a much simpler version of that kind of mechanic to start things off. Prime Cores mint in January, then you’ll have roughly three months of this reroll process, to work out how to build the best Prime Core collection. Most people probably won’t be able to get to seven, so there’ll be that aspirational chase goal. Your Prime Cores will have utility in terms of activating the Realm Forge. The number of elemental affinities across all of your Prime Cores scale the bonuses on your resource generators in the Forge, your production factories.
We’re taking a major lesson learned from Crypto Unicorns and leaning into passive strategic gameplay instead of a lot of click-and-grind gameplay, particularly for the Prime Cores. As for the Realm Forge, you can think of it as a strategic economy game, where your synergies directly tie into your OLYMPUS token rewards.
Here’s the beautiful part of the system; the Prime Core holders, once they activate the Forge, start to receive OLYMPUS based on how many resources they’re generating relative to other Prime Core holders. Prime Core trading fees are going to buy back and burn OLYMPUS tokens, which is creating a heavily deflationary mechanism tied to the emission of OLYMPUS.
One of the things we’ve been semi-quiet about is there are no investor or team unlocks of the token. We actually have no guaranteed tokens as a part of the OLYMPUS token, which means 100%, well I should say 90% because 10% is locked in liquidity pools permanently, will go to the community. As a developer, obviously, we take a tax on the overall economy.
I think the alignment of incentives between developer and community is much stronger. Every step of the way, when we earn tokens, the community is getting more in what’s being burned, because that’s better for everyone. Then as the community spends tokens that they’re earning on card gotcha, by building out their armies over time, they’re earning tokens for the long-term leaderboard. So it starts with resource generation, then shifts over time towards the power of your army, which is you pulling from gatcha to build out your NFT collection.
This seems to be a much better system than token vesting, which causes so many problems?
I think time-based vesting is just silly because you have no idea whether your product has any market fit to begin with. And you have no idea what demand is going to be. To put it bluntly, that bit us in the ass with Crypto Unicorns many times because we were trying to predict new demand and behavior.
How do you build a system which is designed to self-regulate? In certain cases, there’ll be less OLYMPUS token emissions and really bare market conditions, and you could say, that’s less tokens to fight over. Well, I would argue that the value of those tokens is better preserved. I think that’s ultimately the root of this – you can only create a sustainable economy if value is preserved over time.
You want to build a great game and you want people to spend money, and spend it over time. That’s what keeps you as the developer alive.
What do investors think about that?
I thought it would be a much bigger fight than it was, but I think they’re seeing the writing on the wall. The old meta and the copy-paste tokenomics from the last few years are not working.
I also think they see me as a bit of a crazy cowboy, and they’re like we’re going to see if this works and go from there. But they’re also investors in us, the business and the equity behind the business. Again, this is a new model. We grow book value by successfully building and scaling this economy that we take this very small tax from in perpetuity or as long as we’re the core developer. Eventually we do plan to apply DAO-based governments again, just not from the beginning. So it wasn’t a fight, it was actually something they quickly signed up for.
This novel Prime Cores DN404’s earning a token over time right through gameplay, they’re excited to see how it plays out.
With Neo Olympus being a more hardcore game than Crypto Unicorns, and also fully onchain, how does it fit within your segmentation of audience?
This is the magic question, the thing that will determine success or failure. I would argue that Crypto Unicorns being for everyone is a terrible way to design and build games. With Neo Olympus, we are very focused on crypto natives, that’s why the economic inception phase is designed for people who are NFT veterans.
The gameplay activation phase, which comes after the initial series of gamified mint events, is a chance for the grinder players to show up.
I’m excited about this map-based gameplay leaning heavily into tactical RPGs. It’s like Fire Emblem with mechs, monsters, and titans. It comes down to Prime Core holders and the Realm Forge production of monsters and titans. Eventually the Realm produces realm shards, which are the map pieces. You put your titans and monsters on the map and protect your piece and the hero grinders show up and try to get resources off that map. That’s a really good marriage of game loop to economy.
Unlike Crypto Unicorns, this is the game loop. There’s no jousting and potentially racing and tribes and all this other stuff and the ecosystem of second party. No, this is the focus.
Stay up-to-date via Laguna Labs’ website and the Neo Olympus X channel.
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