The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below. 

00:00:03:01 – 00:00:15:21

Richard Carthon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon, and today, I have a really special guest all the way out in Berlin working on a really cool project, Spielworks, that I’m excited to learn more about. We have Adrian, how are you doing today? 

00:00:16:11 – 00:00:18:04

Adrian Krion: Hi, Richard. I’m great. Thanks for having me. 

00:00:18:19 – 00:00:23:25

Richard Carthon: Of course. Well, excited to learn more about you and Spielworks, but before we do, let’s start with some background about yourself. 

00:00:25:08 – 00:00:43:18

Adrian Krion: Yeah. So, I have a background in mathematics and computer science. I used to work with the largest stock exchange operator in Germany and was building markets for commodities, mostly huge systems that went on to trade hundreds of billions of volume later on. 

00:00:44:17 – 00:00:45:02

Richard Carthon: Wow.

00:00:45:04 – 00:00:55:23

Adrian Krion: So, I have a strong background in markets and I have a natural interest in at all things, currencies and assets. So, touching into the Blockchain space was very natural for me. 

00:00:56:21 – 00:00:59:07

Richard Carthon: For sure, man. And so coming from that.   

00:00:59:15 – 00:01:00:24

Adrian Krion: Moving to that right away. 

00:01:01:13 – 00:01:14:15

Richard Carthon: Oh, no, no doubt. And you know, with that background in, you know, basically traditional finance, what was that first introduction to Crypto and Blockchain? Like, at what point where you’re like, Oh, this looks like a pretty cool thing I should look into a little bit more?

00:01:16:12 – 00:01:27:21

Adrian Krion: That actually came from a totally different angle, I used to play online poker a lot during my studies during university and the online poker community picked up Bitcoin very early on, right? 

00:01:28:13 – 00:01:28:28

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:01:29:00 – 00:01:53:23

Adrian Krion: That was about late 2010, early 2011 I believe. And that was the first time I actually saw Bitcoin and got interested in it, but I never kind of got around really like diving deep back then. So, only in early 2013, it was the first time that I first bought Bitcoin and then it never like lost me again. So, I kind of caught on. 

00:01:54:14 – 00:02:23:11

Richard Carthon: For sure. Well, lucky that you got in early, even, you know, from online gambling is pretty cool that like that was your first intro to the space and, you know, have steadily been more involved with Bitcoin. But like you said, you have a really robust experience within the financial aspects being a market manager, dealing with billions of dollars. What caused the transition into getting more into the Crypto Blockchain focused area? Like, tell us about the journey to Spielworks. 

00:02:25:13 – 00:03:05:16

Adrian Krion: Yeah. So, I actually left the stock exchange operator, at the end of 2013, because I wanted to start my own thing. So, I started a software company and there we actually were like, talking a lot about Blockchain and first Bitcoin, then Ethereum. I didn’t really like Ethereum when I first saw it, I thought it wouldn’t make sense. But I changed my mind over time when I saw kind of where the potential is. And so, with that software company, we started professionally offering software development services on top of the Ethereum back in 2016, right? And that brought us to all kinds of ICOs clients in 2017 during the ICO trades, right? 

00:03:05:18 – 00:03:06:03

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:03:06:05 – 00:03:32:18

Adrian Krion: And that effectively then led us to, well, set up a separate company that would take care of all things Blockchain. And this is what Spielworks is today, right? And yeah, we were doing a little bit of consulting to find out kind of where the industries are that would like, have the highest potential of driving mass adoption of Blockchain. And there we found out that gaming has like, among the highest potential.

00:03:32:20 – 00:03:34:01

Richard Carthon: Huge potential, yeah.

00:03:34:03 – 00:03:47:04

Adrian Krion: Breakthrough, right? And so, that was when we started focusing on products on first Wombat and the Layer One play and kind of driving mass adoption of Blockchain through gaming. 

00:03:48:00 – 00:04:12:23

Richard Carthon: For sure. And it’s interesting that you bring that up. So, going through the ICO craze, helping different projects through the like consulting lens, but then also kind of pivoting more into like the gaming aspect, kind of walk us through of like where Spielworks  currently is. Is it that y’all are currently working on onboarding a lot of gaming type of companies onto the platform? Do you have like, different arms for different types of Blockchain applications? Like walk us through that. 

00:04:14:00 – 00:04:53:02

Adrian Krion: So, we have two products, essentially. One is Wombat, which is a wallet, kind of a dApp explorer wallet, right? We’re mostly focusing on EOS so far, but we’re currently also building on top of Ethereum. And it’s the largest EOS wallet, in terms of sign ups and new accounts created in the last year, so, that’s one thing. And the other that we’re actually using for onboarding hundreds of thousands or millions of users into the Blockchain space is One Play, which is a game reward platform that pays users with Crypto, right?

00:04:53:04 – 00:04:53:19

Richard Carthon: Wow.

00:04:53:21 – 00:05:21:29

Adrian Krion: For playing games, for playing traditional mobile and desktop games, right? So, you basically just sign up on the platform, you download a few games, you get so called “One Box,” which is our like intermediate currency that you can exchange for EOS or Bitcoin or NFTs or whatever else you like. And that way we have a very easy approach for like, really a lot of users who like games.

00:05:22:01 – 00:05:22:21

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:05:22:23 – 00:05:45:22

Adrian Krion: To get into the Crypto space. And we’re basically the first touch point for a lot of those people with Crypto. And this is our main focus where we actually want to bring millions of users to Crypto assets into Crypto assets, like, using Crypto, using Blockchain through gaming in a kind of risk free way, right? 

00:05:46:02 – 00:05:46:17

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:05:46:19 – 00:06:01:20

Adrian Krion: And for that, we’re working with tons of game publishers who are interested in like, also getting in touch with Crypto and NFTs and stuff. And we’re a very simple way of getting kind of on board into the Crypto space. 

00:06:02:05 – 00:06:33:19

Richard Carthon: For sure, man. And that’s pretty amazing. Like, I definitely want to spent time on both of those because they’re both very unique. I want to spend time on the wallet. So you chose EOS, right? Help explain why you made that decision. And I can definitely understand why y’all are probably driving the most adoption for like, having that as a basis, because a lot of these wallets, usually Ethereum based, are really just Ethereum based, right? So, how did y’all come up with that decision? And what has that transition, like, been like for y’all? 

00:06:35:14 – 00:07:18:10

Adrian Krion: Yeah. So, when we talked back in 2018, we’re looking into the gaming space, right? And we’re looking into Blockchain’s that could actually drive that mass adoption. And when you look at gaming and millions of users, millions of simultaneous users who do a lot of transactions, we thought that Ethereum won’t scale quickly enough to onboard millions of users and to actually cater for their transactions, right? In a fast way. 

00:07:19:10 – 00:07:53:24

Adrian Krion: So, we’re looking into alternatives to Ethereum back in 2018, and that was when EOS actually got launched, the US mainnet. And so, we looked at that. It took a little while for it to become really stable, but then we realized that the UX of EOS was actually quite cool, especially for users who’ve never seen the Blockchain before, because transactions get confirmed very, very quickly. It kind of feels like it’s synchronous, right? That it takes like maybe half a second or a second to get an answer, whether your transactions are secure or not. And transactions were really, really cheap, right?

00:07:53:26 – 00:07:54:11

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:07:54:13 – 00:08:33:06

Adrian Krion: So, we could actually afford like, to pay for these transactions for our users. All that we needed was very simple onboarding into EOS, because EOS has a few quirks when it comes to onboarding into the Blockchain. You have to create an account, this costs a little money on the Blockchain and so on. So, we built a service around that to make it really simple. And so, that allowed us to offer a very, very simple UX for all these first time Crypto users, right? And this is still something that EOS offers and that’s still very cool with EOS because yeah, transactions are so fast, transactions are so cheap, right?

00:08:33:08 – 00:08:33:23

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:08:33:25 – 00:08:56:08

Adrian Krion: You can still kind of cover all that stuff without actually exposing users to it. And so, that was the main rationale behind choosing EOS. But we always said that we want to go where kind of all the good content is and great like, dApps, great assets. So, this is why we’re currently expanding into the Ethereum space and other Blockchain’s as well. 

00:08:56:29 – 00:09:39:27

Richard Carthon: For sure. Thanks for explaining that. It makes a lot of sense. And the fact that you had the foresight to try to create UI, UX, that would make the onboarding so easy that anyone would be able to pick it up and use it and try to figure out those nuances for the end user is very important. And I think that is where adoption needs to continue to head, is to be innovative, to make it so anyone can pick this up without really realizing that necessarily that they’re using Crypto. And it sounds like that’s something that you’re heavily getting involved in, especially as we kind of talk about the other side of this, which is on the gaming space. So, if I am a potential user that wants to come on, play the different games on my phone, and then get rewarded in Crypto, what does that process look like for me? 

00:09:40:23 – 00:10:30:13

Adrian Krion: Yeah. That’s actually exactly what we’ve been working on to make it super, super easy, right? So, you go into OnePlay.io  and you sign up with your Google or Twitter or Facebook account and in the background, we will create your Blockchain account already for you, right? You won’t even notice. All we need is basically your backup location. So, we’re using Google Drive for Dropbox to actually store your backup of your private key. It’s encrypted, so it’s secure and stuff. And we do that and you don’t even notice that you that, you know, onboard into the Crypto space, and now you play a few games. They’re just very traditional, usual top notch mobile games, right? You play them, you earn those One Box, you redeem them for EOS or Bitcoin or whatever, right? 

00:10:31:12 – 00:10:31:27

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:10:31:29 – 00:11:04:26

Adrian Krion: And then, you just download Wombat and you restore your backup in the app and you can get going right away, right? So, you can have your assets in your wallet and you can get started. You have your account, you can start signing transactions on the Blockchain immediately, right? So, this is the user journey that we have. So, we want to make it as easy as possible, specifically at the beginning. And then you get paid your rewards into your Wombat wallet immediately. And yeah, there’s nothing else you need to do, you need to take care of, right? 

00:11:04:28 – 00:11:05:13

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:11:05:15 – 00:11:13:19

Adrian Krion: You don’t have to write down your recovery phrase or you don’t have to pay to create your account. It’s all free, right? So, this is supposed to be as simple as possible. 

00:11:14:12 – 00:11:38:12

Richard Carthon: Yeah, it’s very unique. And it’s a model that I don’t think I’ve heard yet on our show. And I think it’s going to drive a lot of user adoption, which is, you know, pretty impressive. So, with those kind of two products that you have going on right now, the two that are basically continuing to move Spielworks forward, do y’all have any other things that are in the pipeline that people might want to be aware of? Like what do y’all have brewing right now? 

00:11:39:05 – 00:11:47:24

Adrian Krion: Yeah. So, as we’re paying Crypto rewards for users, that can, of course, be tokens, but they can, of course, also be NFTs, right?

00:11:48:05 – 00:11:48:20

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:11:48:22 – 00:12:09:24

Adrian Krion: And through that, we are actually the first touch point for many of these game publishers that we work with who provide the games for One Play, right? Like, we have really large titles, right? With hundreds of millions of downloads. It’s not like any kind of niche games.

00:12:09:26 – 00:12:10:22

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:12:10:24 – 00:12:34:17

Adrian Krion: For those publishers were typically the first touch point with Crypto and NFTs. They’re really interested in that also from a strategic angle, right? Because they can see that paying Crypto rewards for playing these games can actually drive their main KPIs like retention, like spend in the games and so on, right? And now, they’re super interested to learn about NFTs as well. 

00:12:34:22 – 00:13:15:19

Adrian Krion: And now, what we are offering is an engine that lets them issue NFTs through our infrastructure with actually no risk, with no, like, they don’t have to do anything. They can just use the existing One Play infrastructure and we can just issue NFTs for their games right into our users wallets, so they have their first exposure for NFTs or with NFTs. And our publishers can find out how kind of how NFTs work, what they do, what they look like for users, where they can trade them, and especially like how that changes their KPIs, right? 

00:13:16:13 – 00:13:16:28

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:13:17:00 – 00:13:54:23

Adrian Krion: And that’s very fascinating. And publishers and gamers just love that, right. They all want to be exposed to NFTs somehow, they don’t know how and which technology to use and how you issue them and how much the cost and what happens if this Blockchain that they chose isn’t the right one and all these kinds of questions. And work with our infrastructure where we get that from them and offer them a one stop solution for kind of like all of Crypto assets stuff, including both tokens and NFTs, which is very fascinating and which is driving a lot of our adoption right now, 

00:13:55:09 – 00:14:50:16

Richard Carthon: No doubt. And yet, y’all are in such a unique spot to be able to offer NFTs to your publishers that are coming on. It’s going to continue to evolve. You are also helping solve that initial hurdle of one, even your everyday consumer, your retail buyer, if you will, of NFTs, of having a quick way to access them of like, Oh, what do I even go to get one? Here you go. I can get one just through playing my game and then through the developers and the publishers that are going out there, it’s like, Oh, we can create our own just organically through our game, so, as they collect them, now, they are like more prized. They want to hold on to them and there’s a reason why they want to potentially have this thing appreciating value over time and other users would want to sell them or what have you. So, the organicness of the ecosystem is already there. So, it’s like you’re not really having to sell it as much. It’s not as hard of a sale to show the value that’s there snd I think that is extremely unique. 

00:14:54:14 – 00:15:25:00

Adrian Krion: Yeah. They can basically just try it out at no risk, right? They don’t need to kind of technically integrate into our systems at all, we do all of that, right? We do all of that for One Play already. So, and that’s not hard, right? So, we can just build this Crypto layer on top and we’re just deepening this Crypto, Blockchain layer on top of their games through offering NFTs. And yeah, I mean, gaming and NFTS is a very natural combination as well, right? 

00:15:25:02 – 00:15:25:17

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:15:25:19 – 00:15:40:25

Adrian Krion: And right now, everybody loves them. And obviously, yeah, the hype is not going to sustain just like that. And there’s going to be ups and downs there, everybody knows that. But, yeah, it’s a very cool spot to be in right now to be able to offer these kinds of things 

00:15:41:14 – 00:16:10:28

Richard Carthon: For sure. Well, it sounds like you have a lot of great things going. Everyone, listening, definitely make sure you go check out Spielworks. But Adrian, I have a couple other questions I want to ask. And just being in this space, as long as you have been, right? Or at least having exposure to it since 2010, the Crypto landscape has drastically changed in the first decade and as we head into this second decade. As we look at 2021 right now, presently a lot has already happened in this year. What are some things that are going on that you think other should be paying attention to? 

00:16:15:15 – 00:17:14:04

Adrian Krion: Yeah. I think that, I mean, it’s not a niche thing and I’m not telling any kind of secrets, but I think that anything that’s going on in the DeFi space is going to be huge, right? And NFTs are also going to play a huge role in DeFi and in finance in general. There is no reason why NFTs should not be financial assets, right? So, there is going to be a lot of works around NFTs as financial assets. So, the next two to three years are just going to be kind of building more infrastructure for that. And thereafter, once we’ve reached kind of mass adoption, that people will be able to like swap tokens seamlessly and trade or use their NFTs as collateral and stuff, that’s going to be awesome. And that is going to happen right from within the applications, right from within a gain lets say, right? 

00:17:14:06 – 00:17:14:21

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:17:14:23 – 00:17:40:09

Adrian Krion: So, this is what I think everybody should be really excited about. This is what everybody should be kind of pointing to and pointing out like how cool it’s going to be. And and they’ll start using these things, right? Whoever is interested in that space should just try out what’s out there and try out a little bit of DeFi, buy some NFTs or get some free drops and so on and just start dealing with that stuff because it’s exciting. 

00:17:41:00 – 00:18:47:28

Richard Carthon: No doubt. It’s a brand new space where a lot of opportunity is going to be there, especially for people who get in early and get some of these like first generation applicable NFTs. But then also the other part that you brought there, I think is really unique is where DeFi and NFTs meet to where, just like you said, being able to use it as collateral like, there hasn’t been a space really in the traditional sense where you could go get some, like really, really like valuable baseball cards and then put them up as collateral to buy a thing. There might be there in very unique situations, right? You have to go find a very established bank or a very established broker that would even consider doing something like that. Whereas in the DeFi space, It’s a lot more applicable and can be done. And it’s cool to see how, like all of these various aspects of Crypto and Blockchain are uniquely being just merged together to make a lot of these financial tools a reality for people and giving financial access to people who otherwise wouldn’t have it, which I think is absolutely incredible. 

00:18:49:04 – 00:19:01:27

Adrian Krion: Yeah. And it’s kind of all been there in the traditional space and the physical space. I mean, like, there’s been pawn shops, right? You can go put up your TV as a collateral to get a loan, right? 

00:19:03:01 – 00:19:03:16

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:19:03:18 – 00:19:25:16

Adrian Krion: But you can’t do that with your virtual assets yet. And virtual assets are going to become more and more important, right? And ubiquitous. They’re going to be everywhere. So, I mean, that thing is unstoppable. It’s just an unstoppable train, and I’m really happy that we’re all on it and the most exciting stuff is still yet to come. 

00:19:26:12 – 00:19:38:05

Richard Carthon: No doubt. And I’m excited to see it as well. So, Adrian, you’ve been in the space for a while now. If you could take all of the knowledge that you have right now and impart wisdom to yourself when you first got started, what are two to three things you would tell yourself?

00:19:39:09 – 00:19:40:11

Adrian Krion: Buy more Bitcoin.

00:19:40:13 – 00:19:41:00

Richard Carthon: For sure.

00:19:41:15 – 00:20:05:25

Adrian Krion: Don’t sell, just I mean, yeah, that’s the most important thing, I believe. But also, I would probably tell myself to jump on this train full-time, much sooner, much earlier on, right? Especially when you have no or little risk with, you know, no family and these things change over time obviously.

00:20:07:24 – 00:20:08:09

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:20:08:11 – 00:20:20:29

Adrian Krion: I should have jumped into it professionally earlier on. That would have been really great because the space is so exciting. It’s kind of like the Dotcom Times. 

00:20:21:09 – 00:20:21:24

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:20:21:26 – 00:20:28:20

Adrian Krion: Or era. And I was too young back then, right? And here it would have been even more exciting to actually jump on the train even earlier. 

00:20:29:09 – 00:21:04:12

Richard Carthon: For sure. And on that, so, I use that analogy a lot, but something interesting that you brought up that I do want to spend some time on, just for a quick second for the audience, is we are giving you exposure to a lot of various speakers that come on the show that are working on amazing projects in the space. And there are all kinds of jobs and roles in this space. If Crypto and Blockchain is something that really sparks your interest and you have traditional skills in marketing and community building and finance and development and you want to take your expertise and services into the Crypto, Blockchain space, there’s opportunities for you. 

00:21:04:18 – 00:21:38:04

Richard Carthon: So, if you are looking for a career change, if you’re looking for opportunities, if you like what you’re seeing in the Crypto, Blockchain space, look for opportunities, go and find them. They’re there and it could literally change your life in a lot of good ways. So, if that’s kind of been tugging on you for a second, whoever is listening to this right now, I’m speaking to you. It might be worth taking that lunge to fully capitalize it, just like Adrian said, like, he wishes he got into it sooner. If something’s pulling on you to try to just take the dive and get into the space, do it. Go ahead. 

00:21:38:24 – 00:22:41:17

Adrian Krion: Just one thing that I wanted to add, because many people associate Blockchain with kind of the very tech nerdy space, right? And it used to be, of course, but it’s not like that anymore, right? So, it’s not just developers who we need in the space. We actually need a lot more people who have very traditional kinds of skills right? Not just like I know how to program, I don’t know, solidity, right? Yeah, there is a lot of solidity. A developer is not enough for sure, but we also need a lot of great UX people for instance. UX Is still a problem in the Blockchain space, right? We need great product people. We need people who know how to build businesses, right? We need people who know how to market stuff, like you said, right? So, all these kinds of things, all these kinds of skills, it will help to have more great people with great skills in the space and in all kinds of areas, and not just development, where it’s kind of obvious that great developers should go there, right?

00:22:41:19 – 00:22:42:04

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:22:42:06 – 00:22:43:19

Adrian Krion: But everywhere else as well.

00:22:43:21 – 00:22:53:20

Richard Carthon: For sure man. Well, definitely appreciate that. And a final question I kind of want to ask as we wrap up is what is a final thought that you want to leave with all of our listeners here today? 

00:22:59:18 – 00:23:39:11

Adrian Krion: That’s hard. Just try it. I think whoever has heard of Blockchain or Crypto or Bitcoin or whatever, don’t just watch or invest, but try it and use it. And just try it for yourself. You don’t have to spend a lot of money, just get a few cents or I don’t know, just go to One Play, download the game and you’ll get a few cents worth of Crypto that you can play with, right? And it’s no risk. And just get a feeling for this experience. Just try out a little bit of DeFi. And it’s so easy and it’s so cool. 

00:23:40:03 – 00:24:17:24

Adrian Krion: There’s so many cool things buying there. You don’t have to do that on Ethereum. Wherever every transaction costs 50 bucks, right You can do it on EOS or on other Blockchains where transactions are fractions of cents and they’re fast and simple. So, just go and try that out and find out whether it’s for you. If it’s not for you, that’s also fine, right? But you should actually just try it out for yourself before judging up on it or also before maybe diving really deep into it and investing tens of thousands of dollars or whatnot, right? But really try it out, play a few Blockchain games, like just try, it’s really great. 

00:24:18:19 – 00:24:43:00

Richard Carthon: For sure. Everyone listening, we talk about it all the time, take action. We want to empower you with knowledge and opportunities that are out there, but it’s then on you to go and take the step. And just like you said, try it out, go do something. You know, I spent a lot of money just getting involved. So, thank you so much for sharing that final thought and for all the information you shared with us today. But what are some ways that people can connect and learn more about you and learn more about everything that Spielworks has going on? 

00:24:44:04 – 00:25:12:10

Adrian Krion: I think that LinkedIn, for myself personally. LinkedIn and Twitter are the best ways or Telegram maybe. You can find me at Adrian Krion. So, just my real name, it’s everywhere. And if you want to find out about One Play and Wombat, just go to OnePlay.io and sign up there and this will also guide you to Wombat. Or you can find Wombat GetWombat.io. Also follow us on Twitter. So, we’re everywhere, we’re all over the place 

00:25:12:29 – 00:25:22:04

Richard Carthon: No doubt. And we’ll make sure to share everything in the show notes as well. But of course thank you again for all of your time. And for everyone listening, Stay Crypto Current.