Jeffrey "Jiho" Zirlin: Ronin Goes Permissionless
Episode publishedPodcast: The Delphi PodcastThe Delphi Podcast
Transcript preview
Preview only
You're now plugged in to the Delphi podcast.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Delphi podcast. Today, I am delighted to have Jiho on the show, of Sky Mavis, developers of Axie Infinity, very much the team that kind of gave the activation energy to this entire sector of gaming and, kinda kicked it all off. So, Jiho, it's a pleasure to have you here. Excited to dig in.
Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. Yeah.
Super excited today to be digging into all things Ronin and, you know, some exciting upcoming developments in terms of things going permissionless, but wanted to kind of, stage set for those that somehow may not have been following along for kind of the broader arc of the Ronin legacy. Like, maybe we can just take a step back and you can give us, I know it's been quite a wild journey, but maybe you can give us the super high level of, like, you know, way back starting with Axie, all the way through to where we are now. Like, what are some of the kind of key milestones as you see it? Maybe you
For sure. So the story of Ronin really starts with Axie Infinity. And so Axie is is obviously gone on to make quite a name for itself. It's in the Guinness Book of World Records now as the number one NFT project by all time trading volume. But once upon a time, it was just this idea of a creature collecting battling game on Ethereum. Basically, many of the early team members, founders, community members met while playing CryptoKitties and kinda had this idea of a game that could really show what a blockchain powered game could be. But so yeah. You know, we this all started out in 2018. But whi
Absolutely. So, yeah, I'm curious then, like, what was that sort of initial, phase like? You know, we often talk about in the games industry where people, like, nail the killer product right and then pivot into building out sort of platform or in for layer as well. Right? Steam and Half Life two, you know, Epic Games with Fortnite. Like, you know, what what did that early period look like, I guess, in terms of saying, okay. You know, we've kind of proven, we validated this. Like, talk me through the, like, decision to, you know, kind of like the curated approach when you guys were initially lo
Sure. I mean, so, basically, when we decided to go get into, basically, the business of publishing games using our infrastructure, we had a fork in the road to choose. Would we, right, kind of spray and pray, give out a lot of grants and, you know, just basically take a lot of shots on goal? You can make the argument, right, that that sounds like the smarter approach. Right? Don't pick winners. Game industry is a hits driven business. Right? Like, just, make sure that, right, you have enough shots on goal that a few, land. We decided to go with a different approach. We felt like we had the abi
I'm curious. Is there some element of, like, obviously, sort of trade offs come with this? I mean, you working so closely with these teams with these teams had the added benefit of, you know, you guys are able to sort of invest in them, like, you know, basically capture some upside from, like, their individual successes as well? Like, is that something you guys worry about being diminished now, or are you still looking to kind of, work very closely with a particular kind of golden cohort or whatever? Would love to understand how that piece has evolved, because I know for a long time, you guys
Yeah. I'm glad you bring this up because this is something that we wanna be really clear on is that even though we're opening up Ronin, we will still be investing in an
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.