Lukas Seel: 0:00

Welcome everybody. This is Helios Horizons, the show where I choose to play weird music in the beginning that has something to do, usually with the topic. This one is topical in the sense that it's called Nexus on the Beach by Roberto Muschi and Giovanni Venosta. So welcome everybody. This is Helios Horizons, episode 26, building Next-Gen Gaming on Web3 with Mihaly Rad, the founder of AI Nexus. Welcome to the show, mihaly.

Mihai Rad: 0:36

Yeah, thank you very much. I wasn't aware about the music connections. I'll share some alpha about the word Nexus later down the line, how I came up with the idea.

Lukas Seel: 0:45

Oh, very interesting. That's very cool. So we usually do this in the sense like first getting an impression of who we're talking to, what got you into the Web3 space, and then, of course, discuss more about what you're building and what the implications are 3 space and then, of course, discuss more about what you're building and what the implications are. So maybe give us a brief introduction to your background, your personal background.

Mihai Rad: 1:18

What did you do before discovering Web 3 and how did you end up working in Web 3? Yeah, sure, I'd love to do that. So I've been making games for about 16 years now. I think I started with really simple Flash games. Some of you might remember those times when we would play Flash games in a browser. I made like 400 of those games over a couple of years and then moved to mobile, where we found a lot of success with the studio.

Mihai Rad: 1:44

I founded the Bullseye studio a while ago and we've been creating simulation games like car driving, bus driving games, all sorts of vehicle driving games published on the app stores, and we're in an association with the Ovilex team and together we have gained a lot. With the Ovilex team and together we have gained a lot of traction on the mobile stores. Our apps are consistently placed top 10, top 20 in their categories and we have millions and millions of users. And that's how the idea to create a WebT project initially came, because we have so many users and I knew that in Web3, the lack of users is one of the main issues.

Lukas Seel: 2:35

Before we get into that, I want to go back a little bit more. Were you always like a gamer? What piqued your interest? What made you decide that you wanted to found your own gaming company? Um, was it kind of a hobby that became a business, or um, yeah, how did you get into the gaming space first?

Mihai Rad: 2:54

yeah, I was one of the lucky kids, uh, in the early 90s, to get a 386 computer. Um and uh, you know, discovering games like, uh, donkey kong and superplex, and games like like those bringing them on floppy disks from friends, uh, that was the first experience. I remember those times fondly, um, and then, yeah, it kind of like I grew up with games and uh, I'll make a short detour now just to let you know that I play protoss in starcraft 2 and our main building there is the nexus. So obviously they kind of led to the name of ai, nexus. But also nexus means like a focal point, a central point where a gathering point, and that's exactly what my project is. It's a gathering point for and that's exactly what my project is. It's a gathering point for people to use and generate content with AI.

Lukas Seel: 3:50

Yeah, very interesting. We'll talk about that nexus in a little bit. Let's go from the Bullseye gaming studio that you founded to then discovering blockchain. Do you remember your first I don't know when you first heard about Bitcoin or any first impressions that you had, and then when did you become professionally interested in it?

Mihai Rad: 4:14

Yeah. So when I first heard about crypto, I really wasn't interested in it. I thought it was a scam. And I'm glad I was in that camp because I think we should all be very aware that outside of our bubble I mean our bubble now because I'm in Web3, but outside of our bubble most people still fear crypto, still don't understand it, still want to stay away from it. So I got interested in crypto at the end of the last bull run. I guess this is how interesting crypto comes and goes At the end of the last bull run. I guess this is how interesting crypto comes and goes. You know, at the end of a bull run and in the middle of a bear market sometimes you tend to go away.

Mihai Rad: 4:54

And then I studied it and I understood that it's not just more happening in the actual tech and industry that can basically touch on most other industries that have no idea about blockchain right now. Gaming obviously was my main interest because a couple of things kind of came together in the sense that I knew that us as a creator and as a studio are very limited with what we can do and obviously we can't really allow users to own their own assets, and the idea of NFTs was really appealing and I really like it now as well. I like the utility NFT idea. Just to be clear, I don't necessarily like a JPEG worth half a million dollars idea, but I do like the utility NFT and those will be implemented in the project as well, as I will share in the next few months.

Lukas Seel: 6:02

Yeah, very interesting where that is going um now. Yesterday you were on the space um as well and you talked a little bit about like discovering um multiverse x specifically, right? I mean you went to university in kluj, is that correct?

Mihai Rad: 6:19

uh, yes, but to be honest, I wasn't really aware about multiverse x in inX. I didn't have any interest in crypto until two and a half years ago, so I knew about eGold, like most Romanians do, but that was it. And then my first real contact with MultiverseX was through a friend of mine who told me about the hackathon from XDAY 2023. And since I had the project for AI Nexus already planned, I decided to join and, to my surprise, we won the first prize in our category in metaverse and gaming category in metaverse and gaming and that kind of like put the stamp of approval and you know it made me very confident that we need to continue with this project and push along with it. And then I got the chance to visit some of the team, to meet some of the team members in CBU, and I talked to them and you know we discussed the win-win scenarios in which I can bring in users and MultiverseX would offer the infrastructure and the tech to do so.

Lukas Seel: 7:35

And I mean this is very interesting and you already mentioned NFTs and different aspects that blockchain enables, but when you were looking for the infrastructure to build your um project on specifically, was there anything that stood out? Um about the choice of multiverse x? Did you ever explore any other um blockchains at that point? Um, was it the hackathon that kind of drew you in um?

Mihai Rad: 8:00

yeah, how did that? A combination of these things. So obviously the winning the hackathon was a game changer and obviously it kind of pushed me towards MultiverseX, because I already had my project and my vision approved by MultiverseX. I did talk to a couple of other blockchains and, while you know, maybe they're larger or they have more users, just the connection and the interactions that I had with them were like 1% of what I had with the Multiverse X team. So I felt that just being so welcomed in the community even if it's a smaller community it's not small by any means, it's just smaller than other blockchains Just being welcomed here and getting all this support meant a lot more to me than just going to one of the very hype chains of the moment, which I know the moment passes oftentimes, especially in crypto.

Mihai Rad: 9:04

What's cool today might be horrible tomorrow, and I think this was the best and the most long-term route that I could have taken. Plus, all of the technical aspects of MultiverseX were very appealing. I like the idea. Back then I was looking at approaching this through an invisible blockchain perspective, in the sense that I would like to onboard Web2 users to Web3 in the most seamless way, without them even knowing that they're taking part in a Web3 action, and MultiverseX had X Elias back then, and now we're exploring some even better options for social logins. The low transaction fees were absolutely essential in choosing a blockchain, because obviously I'm expecting to have a lot of transactions and the fees are what can make or break a game, especially with volume. And, yeah, the security as well. I know this is one of the things that gets pushed in front a lot, and it should. There's nothing like having the security of your funds as a main priority. So these were just some of the main reasons why I chose MultiverseX.

Lukas Seel: 10:25

Totally, and I think let's explore abstraction and security a little bit later, but first also let's give kind of an overview of AI Nexus. What was the winning hackathon pitch? How has the vision the company evolved since?

Mihai Rad: 10:44

And yeah, generally, what are you guys doing there? Yeah, I mean for the hackathon, as I mentioned, I I didn't know we would win, or I wasn't expecting us to win. Uh, I didn't know exactly how how these things work, so I just submitted the project. I didn't. I didn't even go in bucharest, which I regret now, but, uh, you know a lesson learned I'll hopefully be there in um in seoul next year. Um, and there was no amazing pitch or anything, it's just uh.

Mihai Rad: 11:12

I had a very clear vision from the beginning. I want to create a social infrastructure project um, gamified and allow users to to use ai tools in sort of an AI wrapper scenario in which they can create stuff with different AI tools, not made by us, necessarily, but with AI tools that we gather and we integrate in a single UX, and I think that's what the users want. They don't really care what's behind ChatG, gpt or um, dali, or the skybox generator from blockade labs that we're using, or three text to 3d from meshi or any other tools like this. Like you will never. Uh, if you're not a professional, you will never go and use those like um, necessarily, you wouldn't even know about them.

Mihai Rad: 12:03

However, here you just go. Let's say, in AI Nexus, you go into your virtual room with your avatar and you see a frame on the wall and you can just click on the frame and type you know, three lovely puppies and it will just create an image on the wall as a painting or whatever you want it to be, with three lovely puppies. So that's like it's a very intuitive sort of approach. I think, for the all-important idea of mass adoption. We need to make things as simple, as clear, as easy to understand as possible. With the fewest clicks, you should be able to achieve amazing results, and that's what we're trying to do with our app.

Lukas Seel: 12:47

And I mean it's interesting, this metaverse and AI narrative, I think, has emerged and then evolved quite significantly in the past year, you know, with the arrival of ChatGPT, all of these things as a mass-used product. Is there something, like you know, that changed with your outlook on these systems? And also, do you see blockchains as, let's say, a natural home or a natural way of bridging these two technologies like the AI metaverse and blockchain intersection, nexus, if you will? Yeah, nice.

Mihai Rad: 13:28

Good job. I guess the main focus here would be so. Obviously, you can have AI generation in a Web2 scenario and that's fine, right, like. Our app will be a mobile app, web2 app with Web3 components in it. However, user-generated content is fine, but user-generated content that you can own or sell on an open market, I think that's like 100 times more valuable, and that's where blockchain comes in. You can't do that in the web2 space. There's no way.

Mihai Rad: 14:02

Like all of our games on the app stores, we control everything in the games. We control what the users do, what they can create, how they play. Everything works like that. Apple and Google control the monetization part. Anything that the user buys in the game has to go through Apple, and we give them their 30 share, of course, and google as well. Uh, they're not. They're no different from from this perspective. So these are things that, um, you know, and when the user just once uninstalls the app or loses his phone or whatever, um, everything that he's done is gone. So I think this is a fundamental change that now, with blockchain, we can allow the users to generate their own content which is amazing with AI, but then also own that content outside of the app, like outside of the ecosystem, and I think that's one of the main highlights that blockchain brings to what I was imagining with AI Nexus.

Lukas Seel: 15:03

And I will say this and it's interesting like you've seen so many projects come and go in the past years, but I think the ones that have stayed are the ones that really just use blockchain because it makes sense for their use cases, right, like I think AI Nexus is a great example. It's like, okay, well, we're not going to use blockchain just because and just because we want to be part of this exciting new technology and market. No, we're using it to enable specific use cases. You mentioned NFTs, tokenization, true ownership and all of this stuff. What are some of those things that you're kind of most excited about to share with users, and do you have a specific plan of also educating the users in the process? Or is that just something that's kind of enabled and then it's there and then they're free to play with it and experience it?

Mihai Rad: 15:58

Yeah, well, first of all, our whole idea was first OK, we know how to do our stuff in the web 2 space, right, we know how to bring in users. We know how to make games that have good kpis, have good retention, um have good engagement from the users. We know how to monetize those games, um. However, web 3 just brings in an extra layer to to everything I've done in Web2. And I think it's risky to skip this part and to say no, no, no, web3, it will go away. No, it won't go away. Ai won't go away. We'll be seeing more and more of these with every passing day or month or year, or month or year. So I think, first of all, I was just trying to front run the future a bit and to make my business as well future-proof in the sense that I think things will move towards blockchain. I don't know how long it will take, I don't know how it will happen, but I'm already seeing this happen. So and yeah, it's not like I'm some sort of visionary Very large corporations and studios have already begun testing with blockchain and implementing blockchain into their solutions, like even the top S&P 500 companies. Quite a few of them have interactions with blockchain. But yeah, I think for our users, the whole idea is this we want to incentivize them to use blockchain and you don't do that by forcing anything to your users, especially Web2 gamers and app users. The idea is to give them something extra for their efforts in the game. So, if I may just give a quick example, let's say you play one of our games hyper casual games and you finish the game and you place eight on the leaderboard for that week. You get like a thousand coins in the game, right, or diamonds or whatever the currency will be in our game. That's soft currency, that's the game's currency. It doesn't have anything to do with blockchain. It doesn't have anything to do with blockchain.

Mihai Rad: 18:03

However, in addition to that prize, you might also get an NFT that unlocks a jacket Benny's jacket, or a pet or a room. But in order to claim that room, to claim that secondary prize, which is the Web3 prize, you need to have a wallet and you need to log in and you need to understand how it works. A lot of people won't do that. Some will click on the NFT to claim it and they'll get lost and they'll come back to the app.

Mihai Rad: 18:29

Some will uninstall the app because of that, but over time, and with the blockchain and crypto being more and more mainstream, less and less people will fear claiming their NFT or getting to participate in the Web3 space, and that's why I said that we need to use social logins to allow users to have their accounts, their wallets, created in the backend and then, once they are ready to take custody of the wallet, to be able to do so and then to participate in the ecosystem of AI Nexus and then to move on to explore the Multiverse X ecosystem and crypto in general. I don't know if that makes sense. It makes a lot of sense in my mind because I visualize how we will try to incentivize users to use the blockchain, but please let me know if it made sense how I explained it.

Lukas Seel: 19:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100. I mean I was going to ask you whether this was a way of future proofing the business and you mentioned so many. Like, the competition is certainly moving into this field or at least exploring it already, right. So, yeah, there is. There's a sense where, like, okay, well, you're a gaming project that isn't thinking about web3, that's the the risk. Right, it's not jumping into the field, it's the opposite it's not jumping into the field or at least exploring it, and I want to talk about that a little bit more. So you mentioned certain things obviously will be Web2 based and this extra layer of ownership and gamification comes in um through blockchain as well. Do you have like a vision of of how that looks concretely? Like you, you mentioned a few things. Like you get an nft, you claim it, but then is the blockchain interaction all inside of your app, or do you still think they're going to go to x portal and then do stuff there? Do stuff there? How do you see that kind of emerging or X-merging?

Mihai Rad: 20:28

So I think we outlined a plan of about eight different ways that we can implement blockchain into AI Nexus and do it in such a way that we don't step on Google or Apple's toes, because obviously they have their own terms of service when you publish an app on their stores. They have quite a few restrictions, such as no crypto in the game. They do allow NFTs, they do allow wallet logins. So we'll try to play it safe, play it by the rules of the app stores, but also allow our users, if they wish to get out of the app, come into Xportal or on our own website and then participate there with their NFTs or with the NFTs that they create by using AI to min them as NFTs. So it will be a hybrid model in which the action will be initiated in the app, but the Web3 aspects will be finalized outside of the app, either on Xportal or on our own website, where we want to create like a creator marketplace where people can generate stuff with AI and then sell it as an NFT on the marketplace. This is just one of the examples. There are many other things like NFT locked virtual spaces so communities can come in and only members that own a certain NFT or a certain collection of NFTs can come in and participate, can come in and participate.

Mihai Rad: 22:08

We are also thinking of some incentivized programs for content creators to come in. In AI Nexus, create a virtual space, bring in users and then do some sort of revenue share with them, because obviously they're bringing value to much like Twitter is doing with content creators. So, yeah, there are so many possibilities. I've outlined some of them in our white paper and in our plans and I'm sure by the time we launch early next year, both from the community and from our own experience, we will come up with dozens of other use cases for blockchain integration. And yeah, let's not forget, robert Sasu is one of our main advisors and that guy's always full of ideas on how to bring blockchain on the table, so I'm sure he will also bring in some cool ideas in the future.

Lukas Seel: 23:01

Yeah, that was an exciting thing there. Yeah, that was an exciting thing there. I was wondering, as you were talking about these different ways of on the Google, on the App Store platforms or directly on the phone through the apps there, versus bringing people over to your website, to your marketplace and we'll probably talk about the token ideas in a little bit there there as well but I'm wondering, like, what are the legal implications? Like you're dealing, obviously, with so many different users from so many different countries, um, and all of these countries have, um you know, very wild or even non-existent, or sometimes very strict, uh, crypto regulations. Is that something, um, you've had to battle with?

Mihai Rad: 23:44

I mean, uh, not yet, but obviously we're working on a MICA-compliant white paper right now and with MICA coming into effect I mean you've been at XD Munich, lucas, and you've seen that everyone was kind of worried about what's coming yeah, it won't be easy. We'll have to keep adapting to stay on our toes won't be easy. We'll have to keep adapting to stay on our toes, not to do anything that you know results in fines or any other legal issues. But the app stores basically have their own terms of service and policies for the users. Once the users leave the app store or the app, you know they come to our website and they adhere to our terms of service, which we're working on with lawyers, and hopefully everything will be in tip-top shape when we actually launch the app in Q1 next year.

Lukas Seel: 24:37

Yeah, I mean also let's touch, because it's similar user security, right, that's something you brought up earlier. It's something that tipped the scale toward Multiverse X. You know, how do you think about protecting these users Now we have, you have millions of players coming onto the chain on-chain to explore this new technology and we know well about what happens to new users and what happens also with the implications of that new user being burnt. They abandon your game, they abandon perhaps the entire Web3 integration. How do you think about protecting those newcomers and perhaps educating them on?

Mihai Rad: 25:25

best practices. That's a very good point and it's one of the risks that we're taking. But Web3 is all about taking risks. I think they should be calculated risks, not stupid. You know I'll close my eyes and jump forward sort of risk. I don't like those.

Mihai Rad: 25:42

The idea is that, first of all, I think if you were to choose a blockchain where you want to convert users from Web2 to Web3, I think probably MultiverseX is by far the best one to do so. You have the best security. We've all seen the leaked seed phrases and no one can access the funds. So I think, yeah, users will get burned in Web3, but they have less chances of doing so on Multiverse X. That's the first thing.

Mihai Rad: 26:16

The second thing is that I totally agree that we should somehow sort of create a first-time user experience approach to new users that want to join Web3. And we're actually thinking of doing that in AI Nexus, sort of like a gamified tutorial maybe, in which your avatar needs to do this, this, this and that and kind of learns through a game how to use Web3 on Multiverse X properly. Obviously, this will be like any game tutorial. I'll give you the tutorial. You can skip it or you can do it and not understand it. But we'll try to do our part and just bring all the relevant information on the table and of course we don't want any of our users to get burned in the Web2 or the Web3 space.

Lukas Seel: 27:07

Yeah, I mean that's very exciting Actually. Yeah, now thinking about it, obviously these virtual, ai generated and adaptable spaces are kind of like an ideal playground to be like okay, well, now generate a seed phrase or now, I don't know, go hide your seed phrase in a secure place or whatever, and then you're done, and then a token through it, or something yeah, chat, gpt powered blonde girl comes and says, listen, why don't you share your seed phrase with me?

Mihai Rad: 27:34

And then you have to say no, I won't. And then you get 100 points because you chose correctly. You know stuff like that. We can think of many, many ways to make the onboarding gamified and fun and very educational at the same time.

Lukas Seel: 27:51

I mean that's a great example, because this was also on my list to talk about Like AIs, AI agents, NPCs, all of this stuff. It's very exciting the opportunities that have been opening up over the past year or so. Talk a little bit about how these opportunities, these abilities for AI to interact with humans in sort of meaningful ways, can also be used or is used by AI Nexus.

Mihai Rad: 28:19

Yeah, so we're in the process of testing and exploring this, but I'll just give you what we have now and where we want to take this. So right now we have NPCs that you can place anywhere in the virtual spaces and power them by ChatGPT, and also we also have text text to voice um ai. So basically you can create an avatar, customize it as you wish, um, place it in a room and then give it a personality. We're still working on the personality part of things, but you will be able to. To do that. There are already tools that allow you to sort of like you know grumpy old man or happy little girl or whatever you want to think about, and then you can use that as a friend. You can use that like a virtual friend.

Mihai Rad: 29:11

I know maybe it sounds sad now to say that, but why wouldn't you populate your virtual world with AI-powered friends? To your virtual world with AI-powered friends. You can use them as a tutor for learning foreign languages, for learning math, for I don't know learning how to play the guitar. I have no idea. It's basically a world of endless possibilities, because whatever Chet GPT knows, so whatever AI knows, which is everything almost your NPC will know. So it's kind of like uh, you place this guy or girl that can basically become, um, anything you want them to become a friend, a companion or on the business uh side of things, uh, you can place um, uh like a host or um, someone that greets your users when they visit your space, someone that knows everything about your project.

Mihai Rad: 30:07

So let's say you have like a I don't know an nft project. Let's, let's get back to that. You can have a guy or a girl avatar, be there 24 7 and they know everything about the project. They can direct you to links, to URLs to give you information about the NFTs. You know stuff like that. So there are very, very many use cases for AI agents which you can visualize as an NPC, as an avatar. So it makes the whole experience a lot more human in a way, even though we're talking about digital avatars. But it just makes it easier to understand, easier to communicate. I think it's fun and I think at this moment I can't see all the directions where this will go, but I'm sure there are very, very many of them.

Lukas Seel: 31:00

Yeah, and I think that's such a compelling use case I don't know how many in the audience or how many listeners have ever been to meetups in the metaverse.

Lukas Seel: 31:09

I think I've organized a few and it's interesting how that really enhances things. I mean, it's like virtual teams and all this stuff. It's really kind of cool to not just have video but have actual avatars that can interact in some fun ways with the environment. They're in um and you mentioned, I think, something that's very interesting is like, rather than talking to a chat bot, right, I can actually go into a store um, explore what's in the store, like, ask questions about this, this product or that product, or get help for this problem or that problem, and it's a very different experience and probably something interestingly, that's probably appealing to older people. Maybe you know Gen Alpha doesn't give a damn about how they interact with that, or maybe that's the primary target audience, but something like that makes things more human, are actually kind of interesting to older people often, right? So perhaps that's a very interesting way of bringing in an older generation into that and then also explaining them about blockchain.

Mihai Rad: 32:21

I think the um you know the opportunities this opens up in terms of automated education um are quite, um, yeah, quite, yeah, I agree there's so many things that can be that sorry, sorry to interrupt you, lucas, but there are so many things that that this can be spent in so many directions that again it it's really hard to see now how it will go. But what I've learned from making games for the Web2 audience is that many times it's just enough to give a user in our examples, give them a city with streets and a car, and two of them will join the game in multiplayer and they'll just create their own scenarios. One will be a cop, one will be a robber. They'll chase each other. We, you know we're not doing that. They don't have a cop car, but they imagine that they're in a cop car. So people will create scenarios if you give them the right tools and with AI, I think that again, it's 100x what we've been able to do so far, because now you can actually create the stuff that you're imagining.

Lukas Seel: 33:28

Yeah, and so as a business, do you guys see gamers as your primary focus, or are you also looking at this B2B and B2I B2 business to institution kind of sales perspective for AI Nexus?

Mihai Rad: 33:44

specifically yeah, both, but in a very clear direction. So there's no point in talking about B2B or B2I until you talk about B2C. So we need to bring the users first. If there are no users, you know, if you don't build a mall in the middle of nowhere, you build it in a town or in a city where the users are already there and then the business will fill your mall right. So the whole idea is we need to bring in the users first.

Mihai Rad: 34:16

I think we need to reach like a critical number of users, like 1 million plus users or something like that, or at least half a million users in the app, and then it might become interesting for businesses to create their own spaces and their own offices or their own games or their own events in AI Nexus, exactly like Instagram works or Facebook right, if there were no users on Facebook, there wouldn't be any businesses on Facebook advertising. However, if there are many users on Facebook, that's the go-to place to advertise. So that's kind of the plan for AI Nexus to be the platform which enables large users to come in and play and also businesses to come in and advertising this relatively new environment, because I've seen this transition from businesses advertising their local stores. Then the internet came along and they moved to advertising their websites a lot more than their local stores. Then social media came along and people like businesses were advertising their social media pages and not their websites anymore. And I think, if we're moving in this direction of virtual worlds, vr, ar and I think we are, even though it's relatively slow, but it's happening yeah, I think a lot of businesses will want to have a virtual place with all of the things that we just discussed before.

Mihai Rad: 35:44

An NPC that can answer questions 24-7 costs nothing, right, the fact that users can try out, let's say, for product placement, they can try some clothes on their avatar, some digital twins, basically, and then if those look good and you get some compliments in the virtual world, you might be more tempted to buy them in the real world. So I think, as far as e-commerce goes and conversions go, this might be way, way better than what you see on traditional social media and traditional advertising, because you kind of get to to wear the outfit, to try the car, to sit on the new chair or you know. You get to experience the virtual experience, which might lead to real world purchases as well. At least that's the plan yeah, um, that sounds interesting.

Lukas Seel: 36:40

we've discussed the kind of the business approach here and let's dive a little bit deeper in the business approach, because you are the next project launching via X Launchpad. Us a general overview of how you're hoping to attract investors and also why you're raising money from a large number of individuals rather than a few VCs or larger markets.

Mihai Rad: 37:14

First of all, just to put everything into context, we're the next project on X Launchpad and we're also launching on two other launchpads which will be announced shortly. X Launchpad is by far the main launchpad and obviously it's the one closest to our hearts here in the Multiverse X community. The idea was to go with a fair launch approach. Again, I'm new to Web3, but the advisors that I consulted with aren't and they're very wise people and they've seen a couple of cycles come and go into crypto and the whole idea was to try and stay away from the approach where VCs come in, buy it 90% discount, we launch the token, it goes 50x or whatever, and then the VCs start dumping on the community and then that's like a gradual stairs down sort of approach which leads to death right of the project, and I've seen too many charts that look like that and I really wanted to stay away from this approach.

Mihai Rad: 38:29

I think it's more fair to allow the investors to be investors, not small investors and big investors. We're all investors, right. If you have a dollar, if you have $100,000 to invest in a project, you're putting your hard-earned money in the project. So I think we should have fair chances to participate and that's why we went for the fair launch Same price for investors.

Lukas Seel: 38:51

Let's explain, just in case people here aren't familiar with what a fair launch is. Can you explain what that is and how it compares to what launchpads did before, what launchpads usually do?

Mihai Rad: 39:04

Yeah.

Mihai Rad: 39:04

So basically most projects, like I mentioned before, offer VCs like pre-seed or seed or private round which is very much discounted from what they offer to the public round. And then obviously, if the VCs buy for a lot cheaper than the public, they can always sell at a profit but many times doing a disfavor and disservice to the community that bought the token. In order to counteract this, most projects lock up the VC allocation and give it vesting. So let's say, maybe you're locked up with your tokens for two months and then you have vesting of 12 months. But that means that every month as a VC, when your tokens unlock, you'll most likely dump them on the market right away because you're in profit right, because you bought like 90% cheaper than everyone else, and that kind of makes the token price stay underwater and it kind of stops it from evolving.

Mihai Rad: 40:11

Naturally. Also, most of these projects start with a very high valuation and very low supply. So like their fully dilutive valuation might be like 20, 30 million, but they launch like 3% of the supply and it's just numbers that didn't make sense to me from again from a Web2, traditional business perspective. So what we're doing here is going for a fair launch, which means same price for everyone. The only difference is, obviously, some will buy their tokens through X Launchpad and the other Launchpads, while private investors will buy them directly from the company. But they get the same price, same unlock. Everything's fully unlocked on TGE and we have almost 48% of the total token supply unlocked on TGE as well.

Mihai Rad: 41:04

So what this means is that there are no surprises. After it's listed, the market will decide what the price does, not how many VCs sell on unlocks. Yeah, maybe this was, again, probably not the best explanation because it's coming from a mostly Web2 guy, but that's the way I see it. So, going with a lot of supply, a small valuation our FDV is 6 million getting the supply out on the market and then letting the market decide what the token is worth decide what the token is worth instead of, um sort of artificially pumping the token at first and then slowly drowning it with vc unlocks. Let me know, lucas, if this makes sense, because, uh, you've seen more, more token tokenomics than I have, for sure.

Lukas Seel: 41:54

Well, I always aim for my mother to be able to listen to the space and like kind of understand what's what's going on, um, and and so, yeah, just wanted to get that in and also, yeah, the the big thing about launchpads is obviously exactly what you were saying. Vcs, or large investors, buy at a significant discount um and in a very, very short period of time, make um realize their profits and then move on to the next one, and that really greatly hurts the projects, because you don't want a million unhappy investors, because that would certainly deter any growth and really hurt your business in the end as well and your liquidity if you're depending a little bit on the tokens that obviously the team owns or that are allocated toward development.

Mihai Rad: 42:45

I want to get to that. Sorry to interrupt. Just two quick things here. First of all, because I just realized this now you said investors, like the public, investors, I want those investors to become users as well, so I don't just need them to come in and buy the token and that's it. I would like them to buy the token and then use it in the ecosystem once the app goes live next year. So I see them with more value than just people buying a token. There are people buying a token which they will use in the Nexus ecosystem, so they're even more valuable. That's why I think a democratic approach, a fair launch approach, makes a lot more sense. Like you want to participate, you participate, but you pay the same price. It just makes more sense, to me at least. Yeah, sorry. So that was the first thing.

Mihai Rad: 43:32

The second thing which I wanted to point out also related to the tokenomics. Our team allocation is 12% from the supply and we've locked our team for one year and vested it for three years. So basically we will be getting our tokens as a team in the next four years. So that kind of shows our commitment to the project, to the long-term sustainability of the project, and on top of that, we also don't need to sell team tokens because we will be generating revenue from the Web2 part of the app, from in-app purchases and ads, product placement stuff like that. So obviously most projects that are Web3 only don't have this luxury. But we kind of have it and we want to use it. So we want to make the app self-sufficient, the app development self-sufficient, by using the Web2 aspect of the app, and this alleviates a lot of the selling pressure that a normal Web3 project would need to do to develop and to pay the team and to pay marketing.

Lukas Seel: 44:39

Yeah, and I think that's also a very special thing and a very big privilege and great to have for the project. Obviously, and we can talk about that a little bit more, but let's quickly touch on what you can do with the token, like what the utility is. I also at this point remind the listeners who are here live. You can come up and ask questions in about five minutes or so. We'll leave a little bit of room for that. And also, you know right about AI Nexus. There is a little quest going on that is pinned at the top. So you know explaining what the project is about and earn some money. But back to tokenomics and Mihaly.

Mihai Rad: 45:22

Yeah, let me be real quick. Then there's a B2B aspect of the token, in which we will create an analytics dashboard that allows businesses and content creators to see how people actually behave in a virtual environment. I think that's essential for businesses to know if they want to invest and what they want to invest product placement, business integration, advertising in our app. This is something that hasn't been done before, or at least not to my knowledge, so we will be the first to provide anonymized analytics about user behavior in a virtual space. It's very different than what people do on social media or on websites. So I think that's one of the key elements of our token, the B2B one.

Mihai Rad: 46:08

We also have quite a few use cases for players. So, for example, you can use the token to buy the game's currency at very discounted prices through our web store, which is coming up in the next few months. Uh, you can also use the token um for staking, and then you will get some rewards in the token, but also you will get a lot of perks in the app, in the game. So, for example, uh, we'll have a couple of tiers of staking. Um, you know, if you stake this amount of tokens, you will probably get like a free pet and two rooms and some free clothes or, you know, just perks in the game that allow you to progress faster, to have more stuff in the game, to access more places in the game. Um, yeah, we also uh want to use the token for a second.

Lukas Seel: 46:58

I'm just curious do you you see that specific perk as something you can market to a traditional Web2 audience, or do you think that's only going to be interesting for Web3 users in the beginning?

Mihai Rad: 47:11

I think it might become interesting for Web2 as well. I think the highest interest will definitely be among Web3 users, but this also kind of forces us to try to convert as many Web2 users to Web3 users, because then we will have an even larger population for spreading our token. So, yeah, I agree that at this point it makes a lot more sense for Web3 users. However, for example, one of the other perks that we can do is to basically provide all of the content from the app at a very discounted price, like 50% off, if you use the token, because, let's say, if you want to buy a car in AI Nexus or a villa and it costs you $1.99 in US dollars, which you buy as an in-app right, you pay with your credit card. Google takes 30%. Now me as a developer, I've already lost 30% right. Or you, as the user, have already paid 30% extra. Now, if you do it with a token on our website, I can give you a discount of 50% because I'm not paying 30% to Google. So you can have it as the user and I'll give you an even higher discount because I want you to use the token. So you know it makes a lot of sense from many perspectives. We're not violating any of the rules of the app stores. We're just using what's allowed and what's provided to us in the benefit of the users as well.

Mihai Rad: 48:44

So this is kind of like we try to find as many use cases of the token that work without crossing Google and Apple, obviously because we want to be on their stores, but also maximizing the benefits of the token holders. And there's a couple of other things like governance, voting, event participation, creator incentives. There's an airdrop, there's a claim drop. If you refer users to the app, you will get some tokens, so stuff like that. So we have many utilities for the B2C part of the token and, to be honest, I think once we go live, we will keep adding them as we we discover them or as we get suggestions from the community yeah, and that's a beautiful thing, right, like, and especially if you manage to capture a large audience with this token sale, you'll have a lot of people invested in the success of your, of your project.

Lukas Seel: 49:38

Um, that can make really great suggestions, especially if you manage to convert them into players, right. Like, oh, I want this to be added and you can really develop the game together. I mean, that's an exciting. Have you ever had that kind of experience with any of the games where the users really shaped that game?

Mihai Rad: 49:59

No, because there's no way to do do so because, like, for example, for the web two games, we get a lot of suggestions but they're absolutely chaotic, like, uh, we ask them okay, what sort of map would you like us to add next? And they keep replying with very weird stuff or anything else. But uh, on topic, like, what map would you like? And they say add this car, or add this Indian car, or add I don't know. They have their very specific requests here.

Mihai Rad: 50:27

In a more organized fashion, we can give a voice to the people that are actually invested in the project. Like, okay, you're staking or you own the token, you have voting rights. What do you want us to build next? A football stadium or a concert hall? Concert hall, it is because the community voted it, you know. So it it allows for much, much greater participation in the shaping of the project and since this is a continuous development project, there's no like okay, it's done, you know we, we published it, it's, it's ready, it's not ready. Once we publish it, we keep building on it. So that's ready, it's not ready. Once we publish it, we keep building on it. So that's the whole idea, and then the community can actually create alongside us as developers and on themselves with AI tools, and I think that's just a beautiful sort of approach to allowing a lot of freedom of expression and creativity.

Lukas Seel: 51:17

Nice. Again the invitation. If you want to come up and ask a question yourself. The time to request the mic is now. Um, I'll ask some some more questions. Uh, if, if nobody steps up don't see anybody in the comments. Um, first one, of course. Um, when launch?

Mihai Rad: 51:34

um for the token, uh, this december uh, date to be confirmed, but you will find out very soon and the app itself will most likely go live in March of 2025. The app is in a really good spot right now. We have eight people working on it and I'm adding two more in the next month or so, but I just want to take my precaution and not announce it earlier, because I know from experience that when you say it's done, you know you need another month.

Lukas Seel: 52:05

Start the countdown right now.

Mihai Rad: 52:08

No countdowns for us. I know they're popular, but yeah, so yeah, I guess the two main dates would be mid-december for the token and somewhere around march for the app itself and um after launch, and you already discussed this.

Lukas Seel: 52:26

Right, you're not. You're you're putting, I assume, not a beta version out, but you're putting an early version out. And how do you see the, the continuous um development of of the product and exploring, you know, adding user experiences or maps or what's kind of the plan once this is out there?

Mihai Rad: 52:44

yeah, yeah, I mean no, it will be a full version. But again, a full version means it everything's working right, uh. But then the continuous development aspect means mostly adding content, adding more games, adding more furniture, adding more games, adding more furniture, adding more avatar clothing, adding more events, more features, stuff like that. So basically that will be the continuous development. But the app itself, the architecture, the structure, we already have it. I could launch it tomorrow, but it only has like six space templates. It only has like a few dozen clothes for the avatar. It has one pet, a beaver. It has only a couple of games. So that's basically what we're focusing on. We spent the last almost eight or nine months building the boring stuff like the architecture, making it scalable, creating the back end, making sure everything works, everything is integrated. So we kind of built the foundation and now we're adding furniture and decorations to it, and that's the continuous development part.

Lukas Seel: 53:52

Yeah, nice Furnishing the house now Furnishing it exactly. So I guess, maybe going a little bit beyond AI Nexus, how do you see the space gaming, AI, that intersection, develop in the next two, three, four, ten years? And then also, how do you plan on reacting to the new developments as AI Nexus, as a company?

Mihai Rad: 54:19

Yeah, I think AI, user generated content, if if I were to tattoo something on my arm, these would be the words I mean I wouldn't. But if I were to, I think ai, user generated content is the absolute key to to uh, to gaming in the next uh, few years, because and we've already seen a lot of attempts yeah, they're early, but it's the worst, we're gonna get right because the technology is advancing ai technology at a very rapid place. I think now, even even in the iNexus, we have a like a games generator in which we give you the template of the game. It's a very simple 2d game and you can just prompt what the theme of the game should be. So it's a truck game, but you can make the trucks chariots and you can just prompt what the theme of the games will be. So it's a truck game, but you can make the trucks chariots and you can make the background from industrial to medieval you know stuff like that and you can create your own game. It's simple, it's it's not not much, it's nothing to brag about, but for the first time maybe in in human history, without any technical or graphical skills, you, luc, can go in and create your.

Mihai Rad: 55:22

I mean, maybe you have a lot of skills, I don't know, but you can create your own game. You can put a leaderboard on it, you can invite me to beat your high score, you can invite your friends to do that, you know. Basically, it turns you into the game creator and platforms like Roblox or Fortnite or Minecraft. This is why they're so hugely successful, because they allowed users to become creators, not just players, and that's what we're aiming for as well. But again, we're trying to do it on mobile, to be accessible for everyone. The app is free. It will run on most devices, so it doesn't really account for your social status or financial status. If you have a phone like a $100 phone, $50 phone, you'll probably run our app in low resolution, but it will run and you can create nice shit with AI, so I think that's important.

Lukas Seel: 56:17

That's such a key thing. Perhaps not what we want to end on, but but just talk about that a little bit, this accessibility, because obviously for mass adoption and and for people to really be able to interact with it, um it's, it's very important that these can kind of run on low spec devices and ai and metaverse, in particular um, always uses up like so much computation space. I remember like trying um what's it called spatial on a new iPhone and it was just so hard. If the internet wasn't perfect, if there were other apps open, it just wouldn't work. Talk about the importance of making that different and accessible.

Mihai Rad: 56:59

Yeah, of course, and even now, even with the tools that we have now. So, for example, uh, the text to 3d generator, it often takes like maybe up to a minute to create a 3d object. However, I know it sounds like whoa a minute, I don't have this sort of time, but listen, you're creating a 3d object. If one of our designers and the 3d artists at the studio were to create that object, it would take them like eight hours to do it. You're doing it in a minute and you don't know anything about 3d studio, max or maya or blender or stuff like that. You know so and in that minute you can just give the prompt, do something else, go play a game when, when you come back, it's done. You know it's like cooking a nice steak. It's not going to be instant, but two hours from now who's eating a good dinner. So that's kind of like the approach.

Mihai Rad: 57:50

And, yeah, we will do our best to make it as accessible to as many devices as possible. And this was again one of my main issues with the Web3 space that everyone's running for the AAA, unreal 5, excellent-looking games which are accessible to 0.2% of the total population. You know the guys who are gamers and have high-spec PCs. Yeah, I have them. Maybe you have them, but most of the people don't. So most people have phones and that's where we want to be. We want to be on. We'd rather be on millions of phones than have a couple of rich people you know, rich gamers playing our app or our game.

Lukas Seel: 58:36

Love that, Mihaly. Thank you so much.

Mihai Rad: 58:40

I guess the last question to you before we wrap up the space is how can people get involved with AI Nexus? Interested? Please go to our web page on X Launchpad and check out the details. Secondly, if you want to follow our socials on X or on Telegram and Discord, you're more than welcome to join. That's where we're posting content almost on a daily basis. We're sharing videos from the app work in progress, videos behind the scenes, stuff like that, so you'll get all the news and if you have any feedback or any ideas, just feel free to share them, because we really want to listen to what the community says, because you guys might be our future users, so we want to know in advance what sort of things you like, what you would like to see in the app, stuff like that. We might not be able to do all of them, but it's nice to hear them and to put them on a list and then to see which ones make sense.

Lukas Seel: 59:51

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Mihaly. It was very interesting and I learned a lot. Thank you.

Mihai Rad: 1:00:00

Thank you for inviting me and thank you to everyone for listening and I hope to see you guys soon in another X-Spaces.

Lukas Seel: 1:00:10

Sounds good. Thank you everyone. We'll remind you there is a quest going on that you can do at your leisure. This was Helios Horizons, episode 26, with the founder and CEO of AI Nexus, mihai. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll talk to you all very soon. Bye-bye, enjoy the evening. Bye-bye.