Paul Lindsell on Crypto Prophecies’ crypto trading game

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investment pitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have paul linsell the ceo and co-founder of crypto prophecies paul welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here today you're welcome man i'm i'm stoked to be here yeah i know you've been doing a lot in the crypto space

0:22uh and crypto prophecies is a really cool project and i think it's the perfect time uh for this kind of project to come into the space and i would love to just kick it off with a little bit on your background in the space how that led to you starting crypto prophecies sure um i mean i've been in the product design space for over 20 years so user experience design in finance

0:44fintech gaming and more recent years blockchain um held many leadership roles including former uh founder and ceo of the digital design agency uh co-founder and ceo of an algorithmic cryptocurrency trading tap on ethereum uh first got into crypto uh i think bitcoin was about two 270 dollars had no real understanding of uh of crypto at the time uh the price dropped by 10 i sold and

1:11that's my kind of sob story with uh with bitcoin uh early late late 2016 early 17 my now business partner felipe he got me involved in his blockchain project um and since then i've just never looked back 2018 we started designing crypto trading game uh called bot wars ultimate trading that launched last year uh and our learnings from that game and listening to to players and users

1:37basically inspired us to to build the crypto prophecies which is a price prediction game very cool and yeah i actually saw bot wars um and that was a that was really cool project as well but i know crypto prophecies has quite a bit of intricacies in it and you've really incorporated nfts in a unique way i would love for you to just explain a little bit more about you know crypto

1:57prophecies the game what is it and what is it all about for sure so the crypto prophecies it's a decentralized price prediction a peer-to-peer price prediction game that uses nft characters and magic items so in a nutshell you place your wager in our tcp token and you go head-to-head with other players and you battle it out over the trading candles you need to predict how each one of

2:22those will close whether it's up or down um so skill get a skill based game so it's based on points and you're against the clock uh so you need to be kind of quick and you also need to watch out for your opponent's magic spells at the end of the the 10 candles the player with the most points is the one who wins the battle and wins the the overall wager very cool i like it

2:47um it gives a nice twist of you know having the candles in there and like still got the crypto touch of it but there's also a lot of collectibles and you know i was looking there's so many different rarities and different items that you can collect uh which is is really cool to have like more of a story and a lore in there can you talk about you know all of the

3:07different tiers and the rarities and these kind of items and the collectible side of like the game as well yeah so i mean there is there's many many layers to the onion but i mean essentially everything that we've tried to put into the crypto prophecies is about making profits in some shape or form so from the collectible model uh that we have which is obviously all

3:30of the nft characters through the various battle modes the prize draw the leaderboards right through the ability to watch live tournaments and also bet on the outcome you know all comes down to having this ability to make a profit um so i mean unlike i guess unlike other other prediction games and platforms out there um we're probably the only skill based

3:54price prediction game that in the world that we know of um so that kind of creates this interesting thing uh as well um it's also player versus player so you know the aim is to not try and beat the market the aim is to try and beat your opponent um so it really doesn't matter if the candles are going up or down what matters is uh whether you predict the

4:14movement faster than your opponent um so then the magic spells make it super super fun as well all of those are nfts as well um and they come in the various different tiers and rarities so there's a collectible game in there as well so uh heaps to do on on all fronts but again it all comes down to you know the ability to make profit with your with your nft characters definitely and

4:43with all these different nfts that these players are collecting you know i've seen a lot of nft marketplaces where people are trying to find rare nfts and resell them for hire or use them in other ways and even incorporate them into defy and like financial products to in other ways monetize the nfts is that some part of crypto prophecies where you have other ways to you know store

5:06value or accumulate value and grow value through the nfts and potentially monetize them in in other ways in the future uh yeah so again what we've tried to do is to create nfts uh or not what we've tried to do what we have done is create nfts that have intrinsic value and utility in the game as well as partner partner games and platforms which is more of that coming soon so with your

5:31different rarities of uh crypto profits there's also things like a multiplier so we have a daily prize draw 25 winners of the prize draw every day they are uh all randomly um verified using chain links uh vrf function so it's also recorded on trains on chains so it's fair and transparent and the multiplier of your profit is anything from one to one to i think

5:57one to thirty two so what we do is we if you win the game we take your wager so let's say it's a thousand tokens and we multiply it by your multiplier amount so you if you wager 1 000 tokens and you've got a legendary card you're going to get 16 000 tickets to that daily prize draw it's probabilistic so you have you know equal chance of winning on each ticket

6:20and you are not limited to how many tickets you can win so there's this other kind of gamble and game mechanic in there and that daily prize pool scales with the number of users and volume on the platform um so again it's kind of no limit to the size of that prize pool as well so it's yet another way to to uh win and get some financial return from your

6:45from your nfts definitely that's really cool the nfts also have a a game inside them in terms of burning so you the entities are um restricted in supply by the generation that they're in and then if you collect five any five of the same race nft and the same rarity so for example five uh common satoshis you can take that to the summoning portal which is uh

7:14this picture behind me um and then you can use a burn spell and you'll basically burn those five common characters and then out of the portal will randomly pop one uncommon so the next tier up so we basically reduce the supply and give you something of a better quality which is uh super fun for the collectors and the gamers out there that's really cool and you know with all

7:39these games coming into the blockchain space i feel like it's attracting a lot more people that aren't really involved in the crypto side of it but they're you know crypto sort of started in the gaming industry which is really cool to continue to merge these two industries uh and there is you know some technical components to the crypto side but not too much

7:58i'm curious about what the infrastructure on the blockchain side and you know is it really technical to you do you do you first of all do just base it all on ethereum nfts or are you also using other blockchain protocols and is there any technical barriers when users collect nfts to have to do technical transactions and intricacies beyond what the game would normally have

8:21without blockchain so um it's built on ethereum but using uh polygons layer 2 so it used to be automatic so that gives players like super fast and super cheap blockchaining gaming experience um it's so fast and quick that you don't even notice the transactions are happening so kind of gone are the days of gas wars um so that does make it really seamless

8:45to say there's no barrier to entry would be wrong at this point um we have had to shift our our launch focus and go to market strategy to you know existing blockchain users and traders so people that are not new uh you know not know coiners they're used to this space um and things are getting easier so you know metamask is a really great wallet that we that we use

9:11and bridging from ethereum to uh polygon is becoming easier by the by the day um but it's still not you know it's still not where we'd like it to be so you know if you're totally new to crypto then stepping across this is it's gonna be tough um but we're doing you know as user experience designers and game designers we're doing everything we can to make that as easy as possible and that

9:35will be something that we'll just constantly keep keep iterating and trying to make even easier so yeah lots lots to do there definitely it is a work in progress and uh earlier on you mentioned about the the tcp token and using that to play the game can you just talk about the overall functionality of the crypto prophecies token uh the sustainable ecosystem

10:00and how it works within the platform in all ways sure so there's about five or six of major utilities for the tcp token it's a fungible token um it is the the main means of exchange for the wager so any of the player versus player games and there are various modes from 1v1 2v2 3v3 uh royal rumbles battle royale um that's the main wager for used in that so

10:28it's also the token that's used to purchase the nft characters items weapons magic capes and pets as well as like ancillaries and everything else kind of needed to power the ecosystem it's the thing that you're most likely to win in the daily probabilistic prize draw but you may win other things like nfts or partner partner nfts as well it's also used as an access token so for

10:55special events and tournaments it will be the the required staking mechanic to gain access uh we will be evolving um genuine governance on the ecosystem so using voting rights on a one-to-one basis at the moment our governance and voting is is just within social channels um and then the the thing that gets a lot of people excited is the

11:21the king we call it the kingdom fee so every battle that happens on the platform uh there's a three percent uh levy that's charged now off of that three percent uh half of it is instantly the tokens are burned so sent to a zero zero wallet address taken out of supply and that obviously puts a deflationary uh pressure on the token um forty percent of that

11:46uh of that three percent is what funds the uh the prize pool so again it gets bigger uh the more players there are the more wages there are and then ten percent of that remaining fun goes towards just platform maintenance so um they're the main things and then the big roadmap one for us is the uh the kind of the esports side of this so we'll be live streaming

12:07um the battle royale games and tournaments um and players will be able to wager um and decentralize pools on the outcome of those games so uh that's that's really kind of uh you know the exciting bit for the end of this year that we're working on very cool thank you for that and yeah i'm excited to talk about the road map but first of all i just want to get a quick

12:29snapshot for the viewers in terms of where you're at right today you know how long you've been working on this and you know how it's going so far with the launch um where are we today so we are literally uh on the on the the edge of our seats waiting to be uh moved on to polygon so to get our token mapped onto polygon uh once we're there then we're opening

12:51up all sorts of things like the kingdom vault for various staking and liquidity uh rewards um and our closed beta is about to launch any day so we'll be getting getting our community to to play and test uh on the test net with us uh with the aim of launching uh as soon as we possibly can but depending on how well or how uh bad the beta goes um so yeah we're looking to launch within

13:20within weeks um so yeah super super fun times um yeah so it's been when did we start developing uh q3 and a q3 last year um so it's pretty fast development sprint but equally there is lots to do because there's you know big ambitions for for the project so definitely and yeah they say fail fast and fail forward um so you know the more things that you that

13:47feedback you get from the community and community driven projects especially in blockchain uh in betas i think are super important for you know shaping the future of the platform ensuring that the community and the users are getting something that they want to use right 100 100 so again our background with you know user experience design and i mean being user first is is what

14:08drives us um obviously we can't listen to every single piece of uh feedback but what we do is to try and structure stuff in a way that allows us to you know really capture the the essence of what our users or future users are saying and thinking and then triage that and channel that into the game design so 100 excuse me now in terms of the you know the long-term vision down the

14:34road uh multiple years down the road when you're looking for widespread adoption and you know hopefully more mainstream and no coiner use of the whole platform and of crypto prophecies what do you think will be some of the main key factors to success in achieving that you know widespread adoption um so the simplicity of use is going to be you know a naturally a key one i mean we

14:59we're in a world where you know we have you know hyper casual gaming and casual gaming which is just something you can just pick up and play uh so we need to to constantly remind ourselves you know which which segment of the gaming space we're in um how easy it is to get involved how quickly people can you know play um and try to create and replicate that

15:20that winning experience which in a peer-to-peer decentralized game is challenging because you may come in and lose and uh not many gamers kind of like like losing first-time rounds um so building up you know our partnerships uh is also really really key to that and there's some really exciting partnerships on the roadmap and being explored at the moment which will

15:44open us up to extremely large existing user bases so being able to work with other brands within the anamoca umbrella is crucial and obviously other brands in the in the blockchain gaming space where we've got you know the same audience but a different proposition um and that as well as the i guess one of the big topics for us is the interoperability

16:08of our nfts how can you how can we allow other games or platforms nfts to be used in our system uh and how can you you know take an nft from the crypto prophecies and go and play in one of the other games out there as well so those things i think are going to be absolutely crucial for you know the the ongoing adoption and that's beyond the the stuff i guess to take for granted in

16:32terms of you know typical kind of retention and engagement mechanics of the game definitely and i'm glad that you mentioned that about the interoperability because i do agree i think that will be super important uh and the difference between having a siloed game that you know people can't transfer value in and out of the game to other games or you know um and i

16:53think that's one of the keys to these decentralized uh marketplaces and that was sort of the uh one of the main benefits that people were talking about you know if you've been having a if you have an nft marketplace and you're able to acquire items or sell off items that you've been working on um i think that will really help especially with anamolca brands having

17:13all these other nft platforms that they've already been really successful on i think that's going to make a big difference uh for crypto prophecies moving forward definitely definitely in that that's you know that ability to you know spend five dollars hundred dollars in in a game and actually you know if you've decided that you don't want to play or take a break from

17:32it then there's a way to to take that value with you um and you know the the other thing that we're doing in in that space as well is allowing players to uh to rent out or lease out their nfts so if you've got a legendary character which has got you know intrinsic value but you're going on holiday or you're offline why not loan that to another player um and you know another

17:54way of kind of earning and making profits so um you know really really fun things ahead super cool paul and for the viewers that are looking to follow along you know with the beta and the upcoming launch and just to learn more about about the game and the nfts and what they can collect and use what's the best way for them to start getting involved into the community

18:16um we are pretty widespread in terms of social channels um telegram is i think around 100 000 um members in our tg channel so that's probably a good place for anybody that's in tg to to start if not you'll find on our on our website which is the uh the cryptoprophecies.com you'll find links to our discord channel which is also a really good growing community and active there

18:39and then twitter facebook um a few other channels as well that you can engage um but yeah we've got you know an active lively team always happy to uh to listen to the community and hear what they're up to and vice versa share what we're up to and so yeah come find us definitely paul i will leave all those links in the description box below as well for the

18:59viewers thanks so much for taking the time to come on to talk about crypto prophecies i'm excited to play the game and uh let's follow up in the near future sounds great thanks for having me