In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to TreasureDAO co-founder Karel Vuong about how the “decentralized gaming console” ecosystem is different to other blockchain game projects, as well as its vision for 2025 as games start to go live on its new ZKsync-based Treasure Chain.
BlockchainGamer.biz: Can you give us the background about how you co-founded Treasure?
Karel Vuong: I went to school for computer science. I dropped out. I’ve always been immersed in wanting to build stuff. I spent a bunch of time in startups and tech companies and made my way from building products to building companies.
I was part of a startup studio. We were incubating ideas and companies from the ground-up. We had some great exits and that led me to the venture side of things. I was in Canada, and being in Toronto, I spent a lot of time in Waterloo, which is the mecca of all things technology here.
A lot of the early crypto Ethereum folks went to school there so part of that was being around them. But I didn’t dive into crypto full time in a meaningful way. Around 2016, I was trading on the side, taking all the random courses that were coming up and just hacking around in my spare time. It didn’t start to merge with my professional life until 2020 or 2021.
At the venture firm, we were starting to look at it more deeply. We were making a bunch of crypto investments. This was about the intersection of fintech and crypto, which segwayed into us starting a digital assets fund. So fast forward, up until Treasure, it was really me trying to immerse myself in evenings and weekends. But I missed building and I wanted to make this my full time thing.
In September 2021, the Loot project started, and out of that my co-founder John Patton started TreasureDAO. Part of the beauty of Treasure was everything was so community-centric. A lot of community members jumped onboard and started building. We formed a team and the rest is history from there.
So no VCs. Just community, then?
That was the inception point, right? It was a full distribution to the community. And part of it is you’re not selling NFTs for money. You’re not raising capital from VCs. It was up to the community to create value, value out of thin air. That was part of the vision.
Loot started off with the building blocks for this fantasy world, based around fantasy equipment, eight words on a card. At that time, there were a whole bunch of other derivatives. For Treasure, we had started with the vantage point of ‘let’s create more of the primitives or the commodities of this fantasy world’. It’s things like gold and lumber and grain and all the things that you would need to populate a world.
The MAGIC token was conceived as a way to serve as the money to drive commerce across this metaverse that we’d be creating together. So we took those initial ideas and it led into this attempt of trying to build a world that had two games or two IPs that simultaneously could tap into this economy that was shared across them.
As anyone who’s done anything in gaming, that’s very hard. And at the same time though, I think the spirit of interoperability and connectedness has always been core. We have always talked about this as being a decentralized game console. It’s a decentralized Nintendo. If Ethereum is the world’s computer, what we’re building is something that tackles a similar kind of spirit.
Over time, we saw more communities come in and aggregate. We have many games. We have many consumer applications and protocols. And they’ve all self-selected and opted into this vision of creating this game console together with us.
How has the game console concept worked out?
There is the immediate thought of, ‘Do you guys have hardware?’ When we launched our mainnet, we were trying to create the retro, nostalgic feeling of you opening your console on Christmas Day. That magic is powerful, but it has led people to ask ‘Where is Treasure’s console?’.
But what we’re trying to do is create the ethos as a whole, making it accessible in that manner. Of course, it’s similar to Ethereum building a world computer. We want to talk about something more than the technical aspects of blockchains and decentralization. Being able to move away from that into something more imaginative. It’s about thinking about the grand scheme of things.
It’s also about the games industry, about what’s possible in terms of the business model and how studios are being formed and incubated and launched in this space, and the manner in which the community is taking a front row seat in game development.
Treasure seems to have a strong indie focus.
I think there’s a spiritual debate to be had as to what triple-A actually means versus what indie means. No-one in this space has triple-A budgets in the same way that traditional gaming has. But at the same time, for us at Treasure, we are firmly in the camp of whether you want to call it indie or not, it’s about blockchain games and let’s embrace all of the new things that we can do in terms of gameplay and ownership.
When you look at the Steam charts, there are certainly titles you recognize and a lot of them are triple-A, but you also have the diamonds in the rough, the needles in the haystacks that are hard to find, but they’re also changing how people think about gaming. It’s something that’s important for us to focus on and for the acceptance of blockchain gaming, it’s probably not going to be something that feels like a triple-A game. I think it’s going to come from an indie game.
Can you talk through your decision to move from Arbitrum and launch the Treasure Chain on ZKsync?
When we started Treasure, we were on Ethereum L1. Obviously that ended up way too expensive so we needed to look for an L2. Arbitrum One was at that time the only realistic candidate. A lot of L2s hadn’t launched mainnet and didn’t fit the criteria, so we ended up on Arbitrum. It was a bet that we made. Remember, at that time, Arbitrum was mainly DeFi. OpenSea didn’t support it. Back then, there was no way to even look at an NFT that was on Arbitrum, right? So we ended up spending two and a half years building there.
Treasure being a DAO, it has a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of coordination, a lot of elements around that. Then Arbitrum decentralized as well. This led to a DAO squared situation. We’re coordinating with the Treasure DAO and we have to engage with the Arbitrum DAO.
We wanted to be good stewards within Arbitrum and worked closely with Offchain Labs, the core developers of Arbitrum, to see beyond DeFi, beyond what Arbitrum was generally known for and prove more support, not just for Treasure, but for new studios coming in. Part of this was the conception of a gaming program that was allocated a pretty big chunk of change to support games.
Certainly, this was a frustrating process for Arbitrum delegates who weren’t immersed in games. There was a lot of education, and a lot of trying to push the ball up the hill. We did get the proposal to pass but part of the process got us thinking ‘Is this the right place and culture for Treasure?’
And then there’s a technology question. This was what eventually led us to move to ZKsync. I mean it was a pretty public process. ZKsync gave us a proposal. Optimism proposed we launched on its Superchain etc.
We were just looking for the best technical environment. If we look long-term where this is all going, I think ZKsync have made all the right bets and they’re on a really fast pace. So we ended up launching on mainnet on ZKsync during December and it’s been super exciting.
From the outside, the decision looked very dramatic.
It’s never going to be a happy moment when you depart. I can see where it came from, but there’s no animosity. For us, we’re laser-focused on consumers – ‘How do we make this the best environment for the eventual mass market?’ and I think ZKsync is the best place for that.
What’s the vision for 2025?
The immediate focus is bringing over three years of accumulated history of projects, users, liquidity and assets, that’s over 200 million of tokens, to the new Treasure chain. This year is about landing in our new home.
Everyone is impatient in this space. Everyone wants a game yesterday, right? But our studios and developers, they’ve been building for two or three years, which is barely any time in traditional game development cycles. Now these developers have the Treasure chain to launch their games on – games like The Beacon, Smolbound, Zeeverse. That’s all happening this year. A lot of these projects are launching their tokens. They’ve been working their way through play testing and airdrop campaigns.
It all ties in with the infrastructure components too, which is why we needed our own chain, because now they can be deeply integrated with the Treasure Chain. I think the AI agentic movement is also part of the story.
This is why we offer the Treasure Development Kit, to bring the blockchain directly into game engines such as Unity, Unreal, Godot by abstracting that experience away. So you take it to the next level where you have more of your game onchain but it’s performant and it’s accessible and also fun. That’s our plan to give developers these building blocks.
The AI part is a good example of this. The vision started in 2023 but it was too early so in summer 2024, we started to revisit some of those early ideas such as being able to build a game that could be played by agents. We ended up getting in contact with Shaw from ElizaOS and creating a proof of concept that’s based around our original IP Smolbrains, which are like these monkeys that accumulate IQ over time and their heads get bigger and bigger.
It’s the perfect IP that lent itself to being a testbed for this. We created something called Smolworld. You can think of it like a Tamagotchi. You have a small monkey companion and you talk via talk or your mic and it’ll decide what to do. It’s bringing something to life but they are the ones making the decisions. Maybe they won’t listen to you half the time, but you also have interesting emergent behaviors.
We also think about where it goes in terms of scaling and creating a framework that allows any game developer to be able to do this, whether it’s creating an AI game from the ground up or building swarms of agents that are autonomous and embedding that into part of your core experience.
How does Treasure stand out from all the other gaming projects?
It’s much easier to build a game that interacts with the blockchain than it was two or three years ago. When you have the combination of all these different pieces, I think that’s where you can make something that’s differentiated.
Game developers have to make a lot of decisions so for us it’s saying ‘Let’s remove 10 of those for you’ as well as enabling them to be able to tap into the network effects of the community. Culturally, I think this has a vibe. It’s more cooperative within Treasure than it is competitive.
That comes back to 2021, when we wanted to make this a community-driven ecosystem. You’re not coming into a chain where you’re isolated, you’re just doing it on your own. You’re part of something.
And I think this is how indie culture stands out. People who play indie games are more open. Triple-A is a more competitive environment but with indie games, there’s more openness. People think ‘I’m going to try something new’. And when it’s awesome, they think ‘I can’t get this experience anywhere else’.
Find out more about Treasure via its website.
Comments are closed.