As always, we are giving away 10 Meltelbrot & eGamers.io Tokens. This time, Makerverse added 10 extra Cube Spawn Patrons’ tokens so we are giving away 20 tokens in total. Giveaway will take place in eGamers.io Subreddit using the Live Chat Room this Sunday, 21/4 23:00 GMT+2 . Make sure you join us and read the interview. Questions will be based on this interview, the first to answer correctly gets both tokens.
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This week I’m chatting again with the digital nomad, Patrick Mockridge – Makerverse. Patrick is well known for his insights and thoughts in this space, and again this interview doesn’t disappoint. It’s really cool the time he takes out to make sure we are all on message, and always a pleasure to hear from the mouths of creatives.
Thanks as always Patrick, let’s get into it! Something that’s caused a buzz recently is your latest token. Can you tell us more about the OC Cookies tokens, and the latest YungRamen Fresh Random OC Cookies Token 3 – especially the idea behind the picture?
It’s a Vaporwave on current ‘Gamer Girl’ Cosplay culture. This culture has become tacky and over-sexualised in a tasteless, immature and boring sort of way. It’s dictated by the tastes of those who pay for the premium subscriptions of these girls, the economics dictate that these girls just play up, act, fake what their subscribers think they want. Enjincoin allows talented personalities like Nikki to create her own persona, her own character, reclaim her own sense of self, her own vision of what makes her attractive and feminine, her own celebrity in a system that currently rewards talentless, tasteless fakes wearing too much makeup, showing too much flesh. You don’t have to show much flesh to be sexy, to be sassy. This image shows this beyond doubt.
Imagine Hermione was a Florida girl, internet famous, a Prime Donna, feisty, an artist, dealing with the challenges of modern America, modern technology culture, gamer culture and was using her powers to make change, to use blockchain to reclaim her sense of identity, which is her own property, not Snapchat’s, not Youtube’s, not anyone else’s.
So this represents ‘The Birth of Venus’, the birth of a new kind of female gamer identity, a new kind of femininity and a reclamation of what has become a tacky, fake and toxic social dynamic between men and women in gaming and online culture.
We want to build the kind of love where people value each other for who they are, not what they believe they should be. Where people take pride in the pure participation in competition, where competition is a way where we all get to know each other better and build relationships. Cookies 3 is a rebellion against this toxic culture, these broken and abusive monetisation models that program us to behave in toxic and abusive ways. That cause everyone to play games at the lowest common denominator.
I’ve been to dozens of museums all over the world and Nicholette is a true artist of our modern age, and Nicholette’s aesthetic generally raises the level, reimagines these constantly recycled gamer tropes like Swords and Sorcery, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dune, The Matrix et cetera in a high fashion, high art, modern way that reflects the modern psychological, social and economic challenges.
We ran a wee experiment on Instagram and boosted this picture as an add. Instagram is very much about being ‘cool’, being ‘unique’ and showing off. The image currently has over 1000 likes, with a 1c cost per engagement. This little experiment tells me that this aesthetic, this vibe is what will expand the demand to become part of the Multiverse into totally new demographics that is currently not attracted to it based on its current aesthetic offering.
Art has many forms they say! and I quite like it for its interpretation and boldness. Do you see this kind of airdropping of tokens a more fun way to share the information and message you want to get across to supporters?
I come from an industry where it’s important to design the right solutions up front. A lot of what I am doing now is trying to build the right conceptual solution, and communicate this and its value to my audience. The messaging in Cookies 3 was about the immutability and standardisation of Multiverse Meta Data.
If the Multiverse is to work as a concept it needs a ‘Multiverse Trade Organisation’ that creates policies for the import and export of items between games, create a price floor of basic functionality of all kinds of items. Whoever owns Enjin ERC-1155 should become part of this conversation in at least in a basic way., if they want to understand their core intrinsic value.
There are a bunch of things like this, I have a lot of these sorts of ideas to communicate, to get people speaking about.
The cookies collection will likely morph later into items/power ups/skins et cetera. And collecting full sets will have bigger rewards.
I want to get my message right, my aesthetic right, to be thinking about the right engineering problems. In this way I will attract the right new audiences into the Makerverse and the Multiverse.
Out of interest, what’s the total list of tokens that Makerverse have created so far?
SFT, FT, OC Cookies 1-3, CubeSpawn Patrons’ token, The 3 individual trophies for our robot design competition, our ‘Golden Raspberry’ token and our Spirit Award (which boosts FT and SFT rewards)
Last time we chatted, you were still thinking about ways to obtain funding for your project, and were focusing on getting the message of Makerverse clear for investors. How’s the progress going on these two fronts?
People see what I’m doing, but for many it’s way ‘ahead of its time’ and for Enjin it’s not currently part of their core get to market strategy. I have some irons in the fire with respect to funding and interest, some rumblings of FOMO… but from my experience it’s best not to rush, to count chickens before they’ve hatched… just to apply pressure in the right places and see what pops.
Currently I’m investigating a side business that’s relatively a much easier sell with multi $100 billion market potential recycling what is a waste product. We just need a few sales of this to fully fund Makerverse to production. And that’s just one thing.
Things are happening. With this stuff it’s best not to disclose anything until it happens though. The pressure reading is much higher than before, that’s about as specific as I can be for now.
Another thing you mentioned in the last interview, was that you were waiting to see how the multiverse pans out before being involved. Recently, I heard you are collaborating with Kyle of Cats in Mechs. Kyle is a machine when it comes to innovative developments, and from what I’ve seen has been a stalwart Enjin supporter from the get go. What’s planned for this working relationship, and why have you joined forces with CiM?
Kyle’s a good guy, wants to do the right things, is very altruistic in nature, but also smart in business. I like the guy, I like what he is trying to do by bringing people together to get the big long term wins as opposed to the short term dopamine rushes.
A bit of dopamine here and there is great, but I think the community overall needs a better balance of concerns. Kyle and I are on the same page with respect to a lot of things, are both free spirits.
I read that you thought what Kyle was working on ‘…is the difference between the Multiverse working as a concept and it not.’ Can you expand on this some more with context?
The whole idea of the ‘Multiverse’ is being able to take your identity, reputation, items and rewards between games where they each manifest in each game according to the dynamics of each game. This only works properly when everyone can agree on a trade policy, a ‘Multiverse Trade Organisation’ set of rules.
Without this, every trade deal involves a long set of drawn out high level bilateral negotiations which are very time consuming and expensive, must be built one at a time. As the number of Multiverse games increases the number of connections increases by the square of sum. In the world there are around 160 nations, the numbers of connections is around 160 x 160 or roughly 26 thousand. And then for each type of item to trade global in a bilateral model you need 26 000 individual organised trade deals. When you include engineering standards, finished items, allowable spare parts it’s simply impossible to manage. This is why we have The World Trade Organisation to harmonise the trade.
If the Multiverse is going to work, we cannot expect functionality across the spectrum to be decided on an ad hoc basis for each item with lead devs spending hours on the phone to other lead devs organising the import and export and the basis of bilateral barter agreements. This simply does not work, was part of the reason the USSR failed economically.
What you’ve mentioned is probably a practical idea, as it sets the scene for smoother future interoperability and a clearer picture of so many faces! Ideas are a plenty! Being an ideas man, I’ve noticed you’re a very active communicator with your loyal supporters, and up for plenty of engaging discussion, even the name change of your telegram account ‘Makerverse Coffee Shop Chat’ illustrates this. Very cool! What drives you to keep up the communication and discussions at such a prolific level?
Founders are ‘over-communicators’ and I worked on my ideas for so long in isolation I had very little sense of the broader market for a long time. The last time I was involved in a blockchain ‘community’ was the Ethereum meetups in London in 2014.
So my community bring me up to speed, give me new perspectives on my project from their view of it in relation to their own lives. All this is very salient information. From them I understand market expectations, where their own passion and motivation for the Makerverse, the Multiverse, Blockchain tech, gaming and the Enjin Platform comes from.
This then gives me a solid anchor of understanding to expand our message elsewhere while remaining coherent. So, for example Yung Ramen cookies 3 is weird to the Enjin community, but I can eat that sort of misunderstanding because it is blowing up on Instagram.
Communication gives me the power to synergise currently separate things. It’s how I got to know Witek, and how I got involved with Enjin in the first place. God gave me the ‘Gift of the Gab’ as the Irish say, and it’s my job to use it to gain a deeper connection and understanding with others, and use this understanding to make the world a better place.
Do you ever sleep? Are you actually a robot Patrick?;) But seriously, for interest sake, what kind of hours are you putting into the project?
I do sleep. A lot actually. But when I sleep I dream about the project. I wake up thinking about the project. When I am not meditating or praying to the Buddha and Bodhisattvas and Jesus and all the saints, it’s all I think about.
Never leaves your mind then eh. Something on my mind is ‘Who is Dr. Manhatten?’ Can you give anymore updates on his identity? A new token for the man of mystery perhaps?
Nope.
Lol, shortest Patrick sentence ever! How about the Cubespawn project? At what stage is this now?
It’s far advanced engineering wise, not communication-wise though. My job with James is to help him to explain his idea and its progress in terms of Legos. Very simple, once that’s made more simple, the answer to this question will be a lot easier as well.
Right now the answer is buried inside a mountain of documentation. It’s roughly that the project needs $300k to get to market, that the market opportunity is in the trillions. We have at least one interested party in making that investment at this time.
James keeps plugging away in his workshop, but how that workshop progress relates to progress the layman can understand, we’re still working on how to communicate that as well.
What can we expect to see coming from the Makerverse camp in the next couple of months?
We might win the investment lottery. We might still be slowly plodding along. Hard to say.
Well I think I’ve probably asked enough, is there anything else that you’d like to update our readership on?
This project is like the Marmite of the Multiverse. High in vitamins, tastes weird, some people love it others don’t. But don’t let your own taste for the product underestimate the value of it. Marmite is big money, engineering is even bigger money. Andrew Yang is running his whole presidential campaign on Vapor Wave memes and post-scarcity universal basic income following the automation revolution.
We have the engineering solution to that. We’re putting people in the drivers’ seat of their own destiny, not Andrew Yang. Hell, we have the original Queen of the whole VaporWave aesthetic from 2011 in Nikki aka Yung Ramen. Look at our roster, Loic Sauce, our economist, since becoming involved in Makerverse is not a nationally recognised media analyst and pundit on cryptocurrencies in France. John Sokol invented the CUDA hardware in your Nvidia GPU.
I have multiple irons in the fire funding wise, know people who know people. I can’t name drop right now, if I did you wouldn’t believe me. Jax of Spirit Clash, just the other day, for example looked at my Github and was surprised I hardly spoke of it, that it’s a top 10% profile. That I’m a man of ‘many hidden talents’.
I am. So, like conclusion, like, imagine what OC Cookies are worth if you factor in that the engagement cost for Cookies 3 on instagram is 1c. What’s the engagement cost for any Multiverse game on Instagram right now? I would suggest probably 10x that or more. How many users 18-25 on Instagram who aren’t even gamers could become buyers in this market? This is how I think, this is the power of the Enjin platform for me.
We all need to think outside the box if we want to get outside the box, nah mean?
Sure do. Outside the box normally has a more open view;) And I think your thoughts on a lot of things are definitely well worth the discussion. Great to see you so open. Thanks again as always for chatting and being truly generous in your response. Look forward to the next! Should anyone wish to follow the progress of the Makerverse project, and get involved in its insightful open discussion, please clickity click below. Melt out!
