All right, everybody. I hope you're having a fantastic morning, noon or night, wherever you guys are in the world. You're in the right place because we are joined with another awesome guest today on the Crypto 101 podcast. We have today joining Brendan and I. By the way, Brendan, hello. How are you doing today? Feeling great. Hey there, everyone. Feeling good. I'm stoked to introduce our guest because this is a Web3 expert, a gaming expert, all things crypto, all things blockchain. We've got JacobC .eth, the founder of Hyperplay joining us today. Jacob, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, man. We're excited to dive in because not every day we get to really speak to somebody who's diving into the niche that you are with Hyperplay. So we want to dive into that. Before we do, we want to get your background. And really, how did you come to be in the position that you are? Yeah, I guess like going way back, I was really attracted to early Bitcoin from a political activist worldview. It was an interest to me, but it wasn't ever something I was like seriously or like from a career perspective involved in. And I worked in Web2 tech. And when I read the Ethereum white paper and started seeing that, I got really kind of annoyingly obsessed. My coworkers would tell you. And so, you know, I went and some early grant funding DAOs. I got to join the MetaMask team. And I worked as operations there and worked on a lot of the growth and monetization strategies. And I had really seen that the biggest area of growth that MetaMask and de facto, the decentralized web we're seeing was coming from gaming use cases. But the wallet experience and the user interactions between a game and the player's wallet, there were challenges that needed to be solved. And so, I, you know, I am still advisor for MetaMask. And I still work really closely with the MetaMask team. But I started Hyperplay to solve both the wallet to game interaction problem for games and also the censorship problem. Because game developers were being forced to build very strange and bizarre user experiences in order to hack around App Store policies. And there needed to be a censorship resistant and developer loyal distribution platform that actually encouraged people to build in a way that makes sense for Web3 instead of making them terrified that their business is gonna be deplatformed. So, yeah. We launched Hyperplay in March. It's available today in early access. And we're super excited for all the games and projects that are building on top of it. Let me just start this off by saying one of the first conversations I had with Bryce was what do we think or what do I think about like Web3 and gaming because that is really my niche. And I'm super stoked to be able to just talk about this with you today because this is really kind of hitting home. So, you have this big experience. Brandon's a big gamer if you couldn't tell. Oh, I can. If only you could see the PC that is sitting right behind the camera. It would tell wonders as to where I stand in the scene. But no, no. Everything else aside, Jacob, you have this big extensive experience when it comes to Ethereum and Layer 2s and crypto as a whole. Why are you just now starting to get really excited about Web3? Like what has you excited to really kind of dig deeper and invest a little bit of extra time and resources into Web3 now? Well, I've definitely been involved in Web3 for a while. So, I'll just say I think that blockchains are about more than... I think a lot of people see this as the next thing or something and that they're going to get rich or something. For me, I think that this is a tech that was built to make people more free, to help people to build and structure human social interaction and human collaboration in a way that we want it to be structured. And I think that what's so exciting about Ethereum is its composability and its interoperability. And so, the composability allows us to structure our social interactions in the ways that we think make the most sense. And the interoperability, the early vision of the internet was a more interconnected world. And then we got a bunch of silos based on surveillance. And today, by building the internet around interoperable rails and giving the internet a financial and transactional layer, it allows us to build ethical business models that ultimately distribute more ownership and power to the people who participate in these systems rather than for Web2 corporate monopolies. Yeah. It kind of hearkens back to in your introduction, you talked a little bit about what really got you inclined to the space was kind of like that political idea of Bitcoin as this new free money that kind of drew you in. And it's almost like what Bitcoin did to money Ethereum is doing to corporations, if you will, or it's that same level of disruption. But it's like more than corporations. It's identity, it's everything. And it reminded me of your name. I wanted to ask, a lot of people are probably like, jacobc .eth. Does this guy have a last name? People might not understand what this is. So tell us what your identity, jacobc .eth is and what does that mean to you and how did it kind of come to be? Yeah. I think that Web3 identity and Web3 reputation is super important. I think there's some larger meta conversations about how we think about identity and reputation in Web3. And certainly, there's a number of people that want sort of what I would consider a pretty dystopian form of Web3 identity that's based on like hashing people's biometric data or something like that. I think that people should be free to have one or many identities and that we need reputation -based governance. The civil problem isn't universally solvable, but we can understand the long -standing reputation of an identity, what kinds of contributions it's made, and to allow people to hold their identity and use it in a way that has reputation. So my ENS name is an example of that. But I generally think that we'll see a lot more reputation -based governance models for the protocols that people are building. And that's going to play a super important and positive role in terms of how people think about identity. Yeah. And even like when I think like with DeFi, even identity is going to come to play a huge part because there's systems that are out there. Maple is one, True Finance. There's a couple of them that use like reputation -based lending. And you could kind of have like an on -chain sort of credit score that's tied back to your ENS or your address. And I just thought that was interesting if anybody at home wants to check out those platforms. It's really cool because like you said, it's a blockchain technology that's really inclusive. For people at home who are listening, they're like, well, why do we need an on -chain credit score? I could go to a bank and I got my credit score. But if you're listening to this, you're probably privileged. And you probably do have some level of like, you could go anywhere and swipe your card, but that's not the whole world. And the whole world sometimes, if they want to get a loan or if they want to get a mortgage or whatever, they need to have identity documents, they need to have credit scores and reputations, or else they're going to get fleeced by a loan shark at 25 % rate. And so this technology does blow open the doors to financial inclusion for sure. But yeah, I definitely want to zoom in on Hyperplay and the things that you're building there. I would love for you just to describe how like a listener at Hyperplay, we've got lots of crossover between crypto lovers and gamers. And so how can somebody kind of bust into the platform and what should they expect? Yeah, so Hyperplay is a Web3 native game launcher. So if people are familiar with Steam, that's a Web2 game launcher and distribution platform. Hyperplay does the same kinds of things that Steam does. It helps you discover Web3 games, download those games, and it is also an aggregator of multiple game stores. So we have our own store, the Hyperplay store. It's got about 50 plus or minus Web3 games that are a part of it. We also aggregate the entire Epic game store. So all of your games, Web2, Web3 games that are in the Epic game store, you can actually play inside of Hyperplay. You can build on -chain representations of your gaming reputation. There's a lot of really exciting things that you can do by aggregating all of the gaming world into the decentralized web and to have an interface for that. And then any game that you launch from within Hyperplay, Hyperplay has an overlay similar to the Steam overlay. So people who've played games in Steam know that you press tab and then you see a chat window. You can see if you have a notification or achievements, Steam is going to overlay those on top of the game that you're playing, your friends requests. So Hyperplay does the same kind of overlay, but we actually are persisting your Metamask wallet into the game. So you can actually approve transactions without ever leaving the context of the game. You can sign in using your wallet instead of a native game. And we support both native or browser -based games. And we'll also be supporting other stores in the future. So we really... Our goal is from an infrastructural perspective to allow the player to carry their wallet, all of the assets inside of that wallet across every game that they play, across every game store. And really to also provide a really developer loyal platform to the builders so that they're not living in fear of being censored or deplatformed for building a Web3 game. I love that you brought up Steam as an example, because it is probably the closest thing that we have to this quasi Web3 marketplace. And I say quasi, right? Because you can trade items between players, between games. If I have something from CSGO and someone else has something from Team Fortress 2, we can make a trade for that. But we still can't trade across marketplaces. Say someone has something in Fortnite, someone has something in Valorant, League of Legends, another one of these games that's made outside of Steam, then you can't trade with them. It's cool because you can. You can trade, you can buy, you can sell. The CSGO marketplace alone is a multi -billion dollar marketplace, which is just a wild thing to say. But do you think that we can get to a place where we can have these cross -platform trades and orders going through? Because that's what I see as the end game of Web3 and gaming, is that I can trade stuff from Riot's platform and items on Riot. I can make those trades with people who have items in CSGO on Steam and so on and so forth. All right, listeners, if your business earns millions or even tens of millions of dollars of revenue, please stop what you're doing and take a close listen. Because NetSuite by Oracle, it's just rolled out literally the best offer we've ever seen. NetSuite does a lot of cool things, but I want to run you through what it does primarily. Primarily, it gives you the visibility and the control that you need to make better decisions for your organization faster. And now for the first time in NetSuite's 22 freaking years as the number one cloud financial system, you can defer payments of a full NetSuite implementation for six months. Not bad. That's no payment and no interest for six months. And you can take advantage of this special financing offer today. NetSuite is also number one because they give your business everything that you need in real time and they give it to you all in one place. And this allows you to reduce manual processes, boost efficiency, build forecasts, and increase productivity across every department. That's exactly how you should be running your business better. Just imagine having that power, what that power is going to do for you of having all that information in one place. It's going to make your decision -making truly data -driven and unprecedented. And NetSuite with their unprecedented offer is going to make this all possible, guys. They've got 33 ,000 companies that have already upgraded to NetSuite who are gaining visibility and control over their financials, their inventory, their HR, their e -commerce, and everything that helps their business run. So listen up because if you've been sizing NetSuite up to make the switch, then you know that this deal is unprecedented. Guys, there's no interest and there's no payments, okay? You got to take advantage of this special financing offer at netsuite .com slash crypto. Again, that's netsuite .com slash crypto. To get the visibility and control you need to weather any storm. Again, that's NetSuite. That's spelled N -E -T -S -U -I -T -E .com slash crypto.