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Grab your feather boas and your heart sunglasses. A special Harry Styles club night is coming to Belfast for the first time and promises a 'Golden' night out for all fans. WOMP Events brings you a new club experience with non-stop solo hits, remixes, and plenty of 1D bangers thrown in the mix.

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Womp

womp

I think Spielberg is trying to see how much money he can make & how many scams he can run at once by exploiting everything that has to do with his Wombat creation, the Polygon Hack, and his NFT App. Editor’s note: This story represents the views of the author of the story. The author is not affiliated with HackerNoon staff and wrote this story on their own. The HackerNoon editorial team has only verified the story for grammatical accuracy and does not condone/condemn any of the claims contained herein. #DYOR WAX, Wombat Exchange & $WOMBAT is looking VERY Sketchy Web3 P2E Apps can't seem to get out their own way, or rather the Devs can't seem to stop thinking about their own pockets. I've seen it too much over the last three years, honestly. A Sh!tcoin is created (or not, sometimes the NFT is the malware/ransomware), branded/marketed as an Alt coin, but the token ain't anywhere near safe or profitable. It always ends up costing the player, even if the Devs get caught. ARKHAM revealed a lot of code & tokens made to just funnel money from one wallet to another so that no one suspects money laundering. What is Wombat Exchange & The WOMBAT App? Funny, there was actually an article written about WOMPLAY.io and the WOMBAT App, of which I'll link here so my fellow writers still get leads. It started out as a very legitimate & profitable NFT Gaming Startup with its own token exchange. And then users went from making $1k-$3k per week with near instant withdrawals to barely making a single dollar, even after staking NFTs & $WOMBAT to build it's value. And $WOMBAT was supposed to be on WAX, EOS, MATIC, TELOS, & ETH Why Am I Telling You This? The Devs literally do not care about your investing, your expected rewards, etc. They're busy Phishing, Pumping and Dumping, and honestly trying to turn this NFT game into a ponzi scheme. I think it's at that point in their scam where the money they're stealing drowns out everything else. Reviews for WOMBAT in the Play Store seem to be artificial & Spielwoks doesn't seem to give a f*** about their Dev profile. 4-5 star reviews seem to be from bots & critical reviews have gotten the same copy/paste fake apology since 2022. Mind you, $WOMBAT only been official for just maybe 5 years. So, their App & Web3 browser makes you pay them to get unlimited access to all your private keys for the different tokens they offer; AND it's a monthly subscription. They claimed that subscribing gets you unlimited access to all your wallets on their app along with unlimited WAX, but the way their RAM is set up, you can't swap. AND they don't give you unlimited WAX, so you can't withdraw either. That's a Rug Pull. How this Will Impact P2E, NFTS & the Cryptocurrency Industry? I hate to seem used to this because Scams always suck, but at this point it's nearly a regular occurrence. I was doing my research for this article on blockscan.io and saw so many other tokens aside from $WOMBAT with the Phishing tag w their wallet profile. There were at least 300 different fake/broken NFTs tagged as either Suspicious, Spam, or straight up Phishing. Gamers will perhaps get tired of this and cut out NFT Gaming entirely or create our own software, specifically to Scam (or expose) the growing number of Scammers. We may also end up with some kind of regulatory body over the Blockchain instead of it being decentralized with only Governance & Security Coins. Centralized banks definitely aren't going to back cryptocurrency any time soon because Defi is an easier target for scammers; but the very same currency that markets itself on being unhackable & decentralized is under near contant attack from Scammers. Because it's decentralized. Final Thoughts on Wombat Exchange/Womplay.io Scam? Be careful out here, honestly. Despite the fact running a legitimate business is more profitable and brings you more opportunities as an entrepreneur, scammers are going to do what they do. Scammers are going to keep up with their schemes & plots until things go so far left that they seem to come full circle, so I think us consumers/programmers/hackers should take a right and stop them in their tracks. They play stupid games (pun intended), they win stupid prizes. **That**should be the next Governance token added to the Blockchain. Of course, here are some of those Google reviews They tried to act like Womplay & Wombat are two different things, but Womplay is the browser that comes with the app. Before the app came, Womplay.io stood alone as the Gamefi Browser & Exchange. SmartConverter (Proxy) (0xE73) Is simply a conversion coin with Zero monetary value, no White paper, and it just funnels stolen crypto to a different wallet trace here. I think Spielberg is trying to see how much money he can make & how many scams he can run at once by exploiting everything that has to do with his Wombat creation, the Polygon Hack, and his NFT App. Editor’s note: This story represents the views of the author of the story. The author is not affiliated with HackerNoon staff and wrote this story on their own. The HackerNoon editorial team has only verified the story for grammatical accuracy and does not condone/condemn any of the claims contained herein. #DYOR Editor’s note: This story represents the views of the author of the story. The author is not affiliated with HackerNoon staff and wrote this story on their own. The HackerNoon editorial team has only verified the story for grammatical accuracy and does not condone/condemn any of the claims contained herein. #DYOR Editor’s note: This story represents the views of the author of the story. The author is not affiliated with HackerNoon staff and wrote this story on their own. The HackerNoon editorial team has only verified the story for grammatical accuracy and does not condone/condemn any of the claims contained herein. #DYOR Editor’s note: This story represents the views of the author of the story. The author is not affiliated with HackerNoon staff and wrote this story on their own. The HackerNoon editorial team has only verified the story for grammatical accuracy and does not condone/condemn any of the claims contained herein. #DYOR WAX, Wombat Exchange & $WOMBAT is looking VERY Sketchy Web3 P2E Apps can't seem to get out their own way, or rather the Devs can't seem to stop thinking about their own pockets. I've seen it too much over the last three years, honestly. A Sh!tcoin is created (or not, sometimes the NFT is the malware/ransomware), branded/marketed as an Alt coin, but the token ain't anywhere near safe or profitable. It always ends up costing the player, even if the Devs get caught. ARKHAM revealed a lot of code & tokens made to just funnel money from one wallet to another so that no one suspects money laundering. What is Wombat Exchange & The WOMBAT App? Funny, there was actually an article written about WOMPLAY.io and the WOMBAT App, of which I'll link here so my fellow writers still get leads. It started out as a very legitimate & profitable NFT Gaming Startup with its own token exchange. And then users went from making $1k-$3k per week with near instant withdrawals to barely making a single dollar, even after staking NFTs & $WOMBAT to build it's value. And $WOMBAT was supposed to be on WAX, EOS, MATIC, TELOS, & ETH Why Am I Telling You This? The Devs literally do not care about your investing, your expected rewards, etc. They're busy Phishing, Pumping and Dumping, and honestly trying to turn this NFT game into a ponzi scheme. I think it's at that point in their scam where the money they're stealing drowns out everything else. Reviews for WOMBAT in the Play Store seem to be artificial & Spielwoks doesn't seem to give a f*** about their Dev profile. 4-5 star reviews seem to be from bots & critical reviews have gotten the same copy/paste fake apology since 2022. Mind you, $WOMBAT only been official for just maybe 5 years. So, their App & Web3 browser makes you pay them to get unlimited access to all your private keys for the different tokens they offer; AND it's a monthly subscription. They claimed that subscribing gets you unlimited access to all your wallets on their app along with unlimited WAX, but the way their RAM is set up, you can't swap. AND they don't give you unlimited WAX, so you can't withdraw either. That's a Rug Pull. How this Will Impact P2E, NFTS & the Cryptocurrency Industry? I hate to seem used to this because Scams always suck, but at this point it's nearly a regular occurrence. I was doing my research for this article on blockscan.io and saw so many other tokens aside from $WOMBAT with the Phishing tag w their wallet profile. There were at least 300 different fake/broken NFTs tagged as either Suspicious, Spam, or straight up Phishing. Gamers will perhaps get tired of this and cut out NFT Gaming entirely or create our own software, specifically to Scam (or expose) the growing number of Scammers. so so We may also end up with some kind of regulatory body over the Blockchain instead of it being decentralized with only Governance & Security Coins. Centralized banks definitely aren't going to back cryptocurrency any time soon because Defi is an easier target for scammers; but the very same currency that markets itself on being unhackable & decentralized is under near contant attack from Scammers. Because it's decentralized. Because Final Thoughts on Wombat Exchange/Womplay.io Scam? Be careful out here, honestly. Despite the fact running a legitimate business is more profitable and brings you more opportunities as an entrepreneur, scammers are going to do what they do. Scammers are going to keep up with their schemes & plots until things go so far left that they seem to come full circle, so I think us consumers/programmers/hackers should take a right and stop them in their tracks. They play stupid games (pun intended), they win stupid prizes. ** That **should be the next Governance token added to the Blockchain. That Of course, here are some of those Google reviews They tried to act like Womplay & Wombat are two different things, but Womplay is the browser that comes with the app. Before the app came, Womplay.io stood alone as the Gamefi Browser & Exchange. SmartConverter (Proxy) (0xE73) Is simply a conversion coin with Zero monetary value, no White paper, and it just funnels stolen crypto to a different wallet trace here . here

Wombat Exchange? Womplay.io? $WOMBAT, WOM, WAX, TELOS? 

How Tokens Are Trending (Womp, Womp)

Crypto gaming uses blockchain technology to enable ownership of in-game assets. There is already a large industry for in-game items like skins and in-game currencies. However, blockchain-based assets enable true ownership since players can store their in-game assets via a crypto wallet. Play-to-Earn (P2E) gaming is one major innovation birthed from crypto gaming, allowing players to earn an income by earning blockchain assets that players can exchange for real currency. With the introduction of in-game asset trading, tradable game tokens, and the prospect of earning cryptocurrencies while playing, crypto gaming not only lays the basis for play-to-earn for players but also modifies the pay-to-play dynamic for gamers. For example, some games require users to buy NFT characters to play, while others let players get started with a free character until they earn enough crypto to buy an NFT character. Crypto gaming allows for transparent, virtual markets in the gaming industry, where players may buy, sell, and trade in-game items without giving up any ownership rights to such items. The fact that these resources are preserved in the form of gaming NFTs speaks to their special nature. Blockchain gaming enables a wide variety of interoperability across gaming ecosystems thanks to integrating in-game assets (i.e., NFTs) across different platforms. However, the degree of interoperability possible when creating a gaming environment depends on the kind of blockchain platform used. Because of the unparalleled security and confidence surrounding blockchain technology, ownership of in-game assets are easier to verify, and that leads us to NFTs and how they benefit blockchain gaming. The Benefit of NFTs in Gaming Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) also play a part in blockchain gaming. NFTs are unique blockchain-based assets that can be used to verify ownership of linked assets. Unlike digital currencies, they are utilized for unique assets to provide a shared sense of ownership. This is what differentiates them from digital currencies. Before the advent of blockchain technology, malicious individuals could save and distribute an infinite number of copies of most digital items and re-sell them. While people can still save and copy files (for example, the "right click, save" movement seen with NFT art pieces), the copied files have no value if they aren't the original. Blockchain technology links an NFT to a file or digital item, allowing anyone to verify its authenticity, so making copies of a file or asset does not affect the value of the original. As a result, blockchain technology enables the creation of truly unique in-game assets, and players can easily verify the authenticity of the assets. In turn, NFTs within the gaming industry can bring many benefits, including a larger creator economy due to the inherent value of NFT gaming assets. Additional benefits include easier and safer in-game item trading between players and additional revenue streams for developers in the form of sales royalties for every NFT item sold. Gaming startup Spielworks onboards Stillfront co-founder to spearhead BizDev and expand its Web3 reach , a blockchain gaming startup, recently welcomed Nicklas Dunham to its team as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). Having built his reputation as a serial entrepreneur in the gaming industry, Dunham will target some of the most prominent enterprises in mainstream gaming to build, grow, and nurture Spielworks’s reach, as well as create new opportunities for collaboration with traditional gaming titles. Spielworks In the last 20+ years, Dunham has founded and worked with many of Sweden’s household names in gaming, such as , , and GRIN. His portfolio includes titles like The Darkness, Chronicles of Riddick, and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for Xbox, Playstation, and PC. Having worked across most of the gaming platforms and business models, Dunham brings his deep understanding of the industry to lead Spielworks’s business development and bolster the company’s effort to pioneer Web3 gaming. Stillfront Starbreeze Spielworks also recently partnered with four popular NFT games to enable its community to enjoy a native login through the Wombat wallet. The integrated games include and on the Binance Smart Chain, (Polygon), and (Wax). Gunstar Metaverse Tiny World Planet IX Realm NFT The partnership essentially integrates these four popular NFT games into the Wombat wallet, expanding Wombat’s portfolio of games while growing its community of NFT enthusiasts. Users can now access these games and exchange NFTs via the Wombat wallet. Spielworks has built one of the fastest-growing blockchain gaming ecosystems in the market, featuring more than 3 million sign-ups and 65,000 daily users. The ecosystem incorporates its multi-chain non-custodial , crypto rewards platform featuring 40 AA and AAA supported titles, and Top 20 NFT staking game counting more than 1 million staked NFTs. Wombat App Womplay Wombat Dungeon Master “As Web3 gaming gains traction, a lot of traditional gaming folks are starting to realize this is where the innovation is at, and that means it’s shaping the future of the broader gaming industry,” says Adrian Krion, CEO of Spielworks. “Spielworks has pioneered blockchain gaming from the beginning, and we’re proud to welcome such a well-regarded traditional gaming innovator to expand our reach and bridge traditional gaming with Web3.” “This is an entirely new frontier, and I’m excited about all the discoveries and impact we will make together with the rest of the Spielworks team,” says Dunham. “There is still a lot to figure out, but I hope to bring the right sense of direction to our partner-making efforts and get everyone in the gaming world as passionate as we are about what Web3 brings to the table.” In Closing Blockchain technology has brought a new dimension to the gaming industry, especially by introducing the Play-to-Earn system and true ownership of in-game items.

How Blockchain Technology Affects Ownership in the Gaming Industry

Crypto gaming is a growing sector in the crypto world with huge potential due to the potential of traditional gaming, which is estimated to be worth over . Despite a sideways-moving crypto market, it looks like crypto gaming still has room to grow this year. $300 billion Let's take a look at the crypto gaming ecosystem in 2022 and some recent developments. How the crypto gaming ecosystem is faring in 2022 Crypto gaming has traditionally been confined to its own crypto bubble, but now large AAA companies are getting interested in the space. Despite pushback from the gaming community, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Square Enix have all publicly lauded the development of blockchain-based gaming. On the other hand, as the industry continues to work to alleviate pain points, an increasing number of individuals are showing interest in games that run on the blockchain. As a result of the limitations that were present in the early days, forthcoming crypto games will need to have deeper gameplay and high-fidelity visuals in order to reach a level of adoption comparable to traditional gaming. Play-to-Earn (P2E) models may be more challenging to accept compared to Play-and-Earn models, due to the latter having a deeper focus on gaming instead of earning tokens. More players will find out that earning value on the blockchain won't distract them from the essential features of the game if developers design games with the primary focus of providing an enjoyable gaming experience for players. The difficulty of getting started in crypto gaming is one of the most significant problems that the industry is facing. This is due to some crypto games having high entry costs. Most of the bigger blockchain games requires players to spend hundreds of dollars in up-front charges, which is something that may initially interest gamers since the games are advertised as having free-to-play aspects (looking at you, Axie Infinity). Developers are becoming aware of these obstacles and are attempting to build and improve the experience that a user has when it is their first time using the product. Crypto gaming and Defi firm Spielworks see's 2.6 million signups and announces $WOMBAT token sale Blockchain technology has opened a new opportunity for video game developers, empowering them to build worlds where users can exercise full and verifiable ownership over digital assets. Even amid the ongoing bear run, the gaming sector of the blockchain space carries on all but undented, indicating a strong user and investor interest. With the decentralized gaming industry poised for more growth as it expands to include and enters , its rise could make the next milestone for the traditional gaming industry. AAA titles mainstream platforms Spielworks, a blockchain gaming, and decentralized finance (Defi) platform announces the upcoming public sale of its $WOMBAT token. Slated for July 27, the event will see the company offer 300 million $WOMBAT, or three percent of the token’s hard-capped maximum supply of 10 billion, to gamers and investors looking to join its blockchain gaming ecosystem. Spielworks' blockchain gaming ecosystem has seen 2.6 million signups and 65,000 daily players. The ecosystem incorporates its multi-chain non-custodial , crypto rewards platform featuring 40 AA and AAA supported titles, and a Top 20 NFT staking game counting 700,000 staked NFTs. Wombat Wallet Womplay Wombat Dungeon Master The $WOMBAT utility and governance token was introduced earlier this year and will be used to acquire assets and services, as well as additional use cases. In the upcoming public sale, the firm will sell $WOMBAT tokens for 0.006 USD each, with a 2,000 USD cap per user/wallet. Investors must pass a Know Your Customer (KYC) check and join the whitelist to participate in the public auction. The three-month public sale vesting period. The vesting period for the public sale is three months. The token was initially released on the Ethereum blockchain, transferrable to other supported networks via cross-chain bridges. The public token sale, however, will take place on the Polygon blockchain. Besides the public sale, gamers will be able to earn the token through community rewards for various actions within the ecosystem. While a total of 30 percent of $WOMBAT’s maximum supply has been allocated to community rewards, their size will gradually decrease over time. Virtual land is becoming a more attractive choice for investors More and more businesses are making in virtual land as a result of the expansion of the metaverse and the phenomenon known as FOMO (fear of missing out). In the same way, as Web2 caused disruptions in the conventional brick-and-mortar retail businesses, Web3 will go much farther in this direction. Emerging metaverses like Decentraland and The Sandbox may give an appealing option for companies re-evaluating their physical footprint. Virtual land in these growing metaverses can provide an attractive (and cheaper) alternative to physical real estate. significant investments Already, we can see how these online venues can successfully host live events. It is conceivable that companies will start exploiting these digital worlds to create realistic virtual shopping experiences for both commodities that exist only in the metaverse and those that exist in the real world. This is the point when going to other digital worlds for inspiration (like PlayStation Home, for example) might be helpful in igniting new ideas and methods for companies to engage with their followers and customers. People will begin to join the blockchain in greater numbers as more companies make investments and get active in the metaverse. In Closing The blockchain ecosystem is still growing in 2022, attracting big players in traditional gaming such as Ubisoft and Square Enix. We're also seeing an increased interest in virtual real estate by investors.

A Look at the Crypto Gaming Ecosystem in 2022

Adrian Krion is the CEO of Spielworks. In this slogging AMA, we hosted Adrian and he explained to our community the purpose of Spielworks. We also took the chance to ask Adrian about tokens, the future of the gaming industry, and interoperability in NFT games. This Slogging thread by Sara Pinto, Mónica Freitas, Adrian Krion, Cris Silva, Mark Finnigan, Jack Boreham, John T., Kelley Dane and Limarc Ambalina occurred in slogging's official #amas channel, and has been edited for readability. Sara Pinto Jul 26, 2022, 10:00 AM Hi @channel, please join me in welcoming the CEO of Spielworks, Adrian Krion. Spielworks fulfills the promise of to empower . With users' experience at the core, they make entering easy, fun and secure. You can ask Adrian anything about: blockchain gaming crypto Launching a token in the bear market Why is the gaming sector still booming despite inflation, etc Why interoperability in NFT games is not a blockchain problem 🙏 1 🔥 2 💯 1 Sara Pinto Jul 26, 2022, 10:01 AM Hey Adrian Krion, it's a pleasure to have you with us. To start off, can you tell us a bit about your background and the how Spielworks started? Mónica Freitas Jul 26, 2022, 10:06 AM Hi Adrian Krion! It's great to meet you! I'd love to know why you created Spielworks. What problem was Spielworks designed to answer? Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 10:16 AM Hi Sara Pinto great to be here and sorry for my little delay. My name is Adrian, I'm the founder & CEO of Spielworks, the company building Wombat. I personally have a background in Computer Science and Mathematics and used to work in traditional finance for over seven years (Deutsche Boerse Group), building market models and trading systems for commodities. I got into crypto in early 2013 by buying Bitcoin at 90$ and that got me hooked really bad 🙂 a bit later when I was running a software services company, I wanted to offer software built on top of Ethereum, which in turn drove me down the blockchain path professionally. In 2018, I decided to dedicate my next professional years to Web 3 and blockchain by founding Spielworks. Our goal has always been to bring blockchain to mass-market gamers by offering a seamless and risk-free experience. This is how we started building Wombat Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 10:23 AM Mónica Freitas Wombat is the flagship product of Spielworks. We really want to reduce barriers for people to get into the Web 3 space and we're convinced that gamers have a high affinity for digital assets, hence they will be early adopters of blockchain, crypto, and Web 3. But even so, there's still a lot of hesitation among gamers to dive deep into crypto because of a lot of complexity in the onboarding process, uncertainty about fraud and scams, the available tools not being very user-friendly, etc. Sara Pinto Jul 26, 2022, 10:22 AM Adrian Krion, you've been working with blockchain for quite some time now! How does Spielworks is trying to achieve that risk-free experience? Can you further explain Wombat to us? Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 10:27 AM Sure, Sara Pinto. It starts with the technical onboarding, i.e. setting up private keys, blockchain accounts, getting your first crypto, and connecting with Web 3 games. However, it's not enough to offer just the technical means because gamers would still wonder "why is that cool?". We solve that by providing a very familiar experience through our ecosystem - gamers can play traditional, mass-market games (that have been proven winners with tens or hundreds of millions of downloads) and earn crypto and NFTs on top of that, either in the Wombat app or on our game rewards platform Womplay. Once gamers have received their first NFTs, the ice breaks, and start wondering "what can I do with that now?". This is exactly the type of curiosity we're looking for Mónica Freitas Jul 26, 2022, 10:30 AM Adrian Krion Interesting. So, you're trying to facilitate web3 adoption. How do you do it? What can people get from Spielworks that will make the process easier? Cris Silva Jul 26, 2022, 10:30 AM Hello Adrian Krion. How do you reward mobile game players with NFTs? Do you have partnerships with big names in the gaming industry that allow you to do this? Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 10:42 AM Mónica Freitas, we're essentially providing anything that's needed to gamers in order for them to be able to play Web 3 games which are fun. The Web 3 gaming movement has had a bit of a slow start because games were not built around fun but around earning aspects (see Axie Infinity), which gave it a lot of spotlights, but also a lot of false impressions from the outside. Games need to be fun in order to be sustainable. Any kind of "play in order to earn" cannot. That's why we have traditional games on the platform because these are provably fun. Only if gamers experience Web 3 in an entertaining way we have a chance of getting them hooked. That's what they get when they sign up with Wombat Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 11:00 AM Cris Silva exactly. We have some big names on the platform from both the traditional gaming space as well as Web 3; games like RAID: Shadow Legens, Lords Mobile, Idle Miner Tycoon are playable with crypto / NFT rewards, but also the likes of Splinterlands or Upland Mark Finnigan Jul 26, 2022, 10:37 AM Hey Adrian Krion! How would you explain the bear market to someone who's not into Web3 yet? And how has it affected Spielworks? Jack Boreham Jul 26, 2022, 10:39 AM Hi  Adrian Krion how would you say Blockchain gaming adds utility to traditional Web2 games? Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 11:04 AM Mark Finnigan, I would say every technology gets adopted in waves, but that's usually not very visible. In crypto, the excitement about the technology more or less directly correlates with market dynamics. Add macro-economic issues like inflation and recessions to the mix, and you've got a bear market. For us, that hasn't been too much of an issue so far because we're working on the transition between Web 2 and Web 3. Traditional Web 2 gamers aren't interested in token prices as much as they are in the games, the fun, the communities, so they're much more likely e.g. to keep trading NFTs for their utility Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 11:09 AM Jack Boreham there are multiple ways of how that can happen, I'll give a few examples: You have an NFT which grants some kind of VIP status in a game (similar to typical season pass frameworks in many free-to-play games). You're able to hand that VIP NFT over to someone else once you don't want to play the game anymore More generally, gamers can preserve their in-game assets even if they don't play a game anymore. Either they sell these assets, or they keep them as collectibles, but at least these aren't lost when you delete your game We also like the notion of "social interoperability" of game NFTs: if you win a mighty item in a game that is an NFT, the fact that you've gained this item isn't only visible within the game, you can show that fact off by showing your NFT wallet so someone else. This is something very powerful John T. Jul 26, 2022, 10:44 AM Hi Adrian Krion! How sustainable do you think the Play-to-Earn model is long-term? Kelley Dane Jul 26, 2022, 10:55 AM Hey Adrian Krion. What do you think it's the issue with interoperability in NFT games? Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 11:13 AM John T. "Play to earn" as in "Play in order to earn" can basically not be sustainable at all. It means that new players only come in because they seek a positive return on their investment, which kind of fulfills the definition of a ponzi scheme - only if there are enough people coming in after you, you can expect to make a positive return. Since the game economies are zero-sum (or negative-sum) economies, there need to be people who are net-negative on the game. "Surprisingly" this is the case in traditional games, though. Here, nobody gets a positive return on their investment, because they're exchanging money for entertainment. Therefore, only if the main driver to play a game (and spend money on it) is outside of pure earning expectations, "play to earn" (I prefer "play and earn") economies can be sustainable all Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 11:19 AM Kelley Dane Interoperability of NFTs in games is typically discussed in a narrow sense of "you can use item X from game A also in game B". This is a very bad example of interoperability of game NFTs because the complexities lie in the semantics of the item (what it to use item X in game B) rather than the mere fact that you have it. Instead, we like focusing on two other aspects of interoperability: means The economical interoperability - this is where you can basically sell items from one game to buy items in another game. This is something very obvious to gamers The social interoperability - as many games, specifically MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), have a large component of "showing off what you got", we think this component can be best leveraged by gamers when the respective items define your identity inside a game don't just live on a game server, but on a public network. That way, your identity as a gamer becomes relevant across games, which is something really powerful Kelley Dane Jul 26, 2022, 11:27 AM Thank you for explain. It does seems, like you mention, that gamers are already familiar with this. So, can the economical and social interoperability further impact the games? Adrian Krion Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 11:48 AM Kelley Dane I think we're just scratching the surface of what will be possible through this interoperability in the future. We've been driving a few of the developments in Wombat (and e.g. the Wombat Dungeon Master game) and will continue in the future, but there are so many amazing things that will happen once there are even more smart brains working on Web 3 games John T. Jul 26, 2022, 11:30 AM Adrian Krion, what would that mean for the game model? A player has to enter with x amount of money, knowing they'll spend it along the way and MAYBE get some back? It seems challenging to sell this model even with the emphasis on the experience. So, the game's unique selling point does need to be really appealing, I imagine. Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 11:51 AM John T. the model that you're describing is essentially the old way of distributing games. You spend 70$ to buy a game on a console, and you hope to get enough entertainment back. The newer model for games is free-to-play, and this is how most Web 3 games will work, too. It's a game that you can play for free and it's fun, but e.g. if you want to start playing competitively, you might have to own an NFT from a certain collection. Whether or not you have to purchase this NFT or you can win it in the free-to-play mode will be up to the game creators Sara Pinto Jul 26, 2022, 11:32 AM Adrian Krion, what are the benefits of launching a token in the bear market? Is Spielworks working on that? Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 11:54 AM Sara Pinto yeah we've been considering to launch a token ever since the early days of Spielworks and Wombat. We never wanted to launch a token before having a substantial amount of first day utility for it, though, so we started preparing our token launch last year. It's actually launching this week, in the bear market 😉 Of course the valuations are much lower right now and the amount of money you can raise with a token will be smaller. However, if you want to acquire long-term partners and token holders, bear market times are actually beneficial because there's much less hype and much more substance in the market. It also means you get a lot more attention if you're not one of 100 projects launching tokens every week John T. Jul 26, 2022, 1:26 PM Adrian Krion, ah, I see. Is there a game you think is leading the play and earn model? One that's being more innovative and creating a whole new environment for players? Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 2:17 PM John T. There's a bunch of games driving this, some of which are already published, some are in development. I think The Sandbox, Blanko's Block Party or Splinterlands are good examples for the usage of blockchain / NFTs as the foundation of a game economy. Some up-and-coming games like My Pet Hooligan or Metalcore will have strong gaming dynamics with a blockchain integration, something like the net generation of play-to-earn Kelley Dane Jul 26, 2022, 1:49 PM Adrian Krion, does the Wombat Dungeon Master game have any specific feauture that also helps to deal with crypto? Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 2:23 PM Kelley Dane Wombat Dungeon Master exists to demonstrate a few cool aspects of NFTs in games: Interoperability - you can use NFTs you got from one game (or also from our game rewards program) in another Utility - NFTs of all different kinds have a use elsewhere Kelley Dane Jul 26, 2022, 3:04 PM That's pretty cool. What's in the future for Wombat Dungeon Master? Adrian Krion Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 3:41 PM Kelley Dane we want to make it as much fun and interactive as possible. There will be PvP elements and more collab possibilities between players. But also I could imagine having a platform game, an endless runner or kind of a puzzle game included into the experience to boost your performance in the game. At the same time, we'll keep adding more blockchains for stakable NFTs, more collections, more collabs, etc John T. Jul 26, 2022, 4:02 PM Adrian Krion oh The Sandbox is a big one. I appreciate they've made their metaverse a true experience. John T. Jul 26, 2022, 4:03 PM Adrian Krion How can we bring more people to web3? How can we make the public know that web3 is safe? Adrian Krion Jul 26, 2022, 4:15 PM John T. I think this will work by people actually experiencing Web 3 without the big hype around it. It's much better if they can do it casually. PayPal is a great example - if you can pay with crypto and transfer crypto to your friends via an app that you already have and trust, that makes it much easier to adopt. That's also our philosophy at Wombat - we want people to experience Web 3 in a casual way, by doing things they love to do anyway Cris Silva Jul 26, 2022, 4:14 PM Adrian Krion I imagine that from a dev pov, it was a challenge to build a platform that could host so many different "services". How long did it take you to be fully operational? Adrian Krion Jul 27, 2022, 4:07 AM Cris Silva to build the first, simple production version of Wombat took us about 6 months. From there on, we've been working on everything for over 3 years. Turns out building in Web 3 takes more effort than in traditional web as there are a lot of quirks and issues with the technology itself and fewer (or none) blueprints on how to do things, also from a business perspective Limarc Ambalina Jul 26, 2022, 6:36 PM Hey Adrian Krion super happy to have you join us here. I often hear people say that the problem with blockchain games is obviously there are better games out there in the traditional gaming market. However, I think that point disregards the hyper casual mobile market. There are already tons of people playing casual games with simple, yet addicting gameplay. Do you think the P2E movement can take advantage of these casual gamers? Adrian Krion Jul 27, 2022, 4:13 AM Limarc Ambalina we've seen a dramatic impact of adding NFTs as rewards to hypercasual games. Many hypercasual companies are looking into this. The only requirement is that it needs to be incredibly easy for players to deal with these NFTs. NFTs can also be used for additional gamification around very simple game loops (like "match 3"). NFTs can have lives of their own, be merged, blended, modified or destroyed, which can all add an additional layer. It's similar to these story modes for hypercasual game models (like in Candycrush or Gardenscapes), only that you use NFTs for that which players can eventually trade. Kelley Dane Jul 26, 2022, 9:43 PM Adrian Krion, thanks! Overall, what do you think it will be the future of the gaming industry? Kelley Dane Jul 26, 2022, 9:43 PM And how is it still booming despite inflation? Is it because it's merging with blockchain? Adrian Krion Adrian Krion Jul 27, 2022, 4:20 AM Kelley Dane I think we'll be moving into more immersive, large-scale worlds in which players spend a lot of time and visit locations that represent certain functionality (aka the Metaverse). Web 3 to me is a prerequisite for a Metaverse to attract a large amount of commercial partners and content creators as they would require real estate in such a world before investing in it heavily. On the other hand, I don't think everything will be in the Metaverse. Especially casual gamers will not want to boot up a Metaverse just to enjoy a few minutes of casual gameplay on a commute, and they also don't benefit from the immersion offered. However, as mentioned before, I see a lot of potential for Web 3 in casual and hypercasual gaming, as well Adrian Krion Jul 27, 2022, 4:22 AM Kelley Dane if the macro-economic trends persist, this will also affect the gaming industry. It's been on a long-lasting growth trajectory, but for sure people will start spending less money on entertainment if they struggle to afford their living. The gaming industry will have to deal with this. Blockchain might help a little bit there because players of Web 3 games get to keep some of their investment. However, the Web 3 gaming spaces make up only a fraction of the entire gaming market, so the effect is currently miniscule Cris Silva Jul 27, 2022, 10:41 AM Adrian Krion I can imagine the struggle. Is there any advice you'd give entrepreneurs trying to enter the web3 space? Cris Silva Jul 27, 2022, 10:42 AM Also, this is in line with John T.'s question, but what has been the biggest challenge for you? Building the platform, bringing together all the services in one space, attracting web2 players...? Adrian Krion Jul 28, 2022, 7:24 AM Sorry I was having issues with Slack yesterday so couldn't answer more questions Adrian Krion Jul 28, 2022, 7:28 AM Cris Silva my advice to people who want to build in Web 3 is to not overthink things but rather do stuff. You only really learn about the market, the industry, the technology and the people when you're in yourself. Also, start with basic and simple things that might be reused by others as kind of a building block. Web 3 is all about interoperability, so make sure you're building open solutions. In general, it's still hard to tell where the entire industry will go and how far adoption will reach, so make sure to be flexible 🔥 1 Cris Silva Jul 28, 2022, 9:50 AM Adrian Krion great advice! Before you go, I'd love to have your thoughts on what's the main factor behind the migration of web2 player to web3. Is it just curiosity, or do they come with an issue web2 just isn't giving them a solution to? Adrian Krion Jul 28, 2022, 10:07 AM Cris Silva the biggest challenge is scaling - both in terms of technology (not all blockchain networks scale, but also they're not all very mature in general, so dealing with them is hard), but also in user and team growth. Scaling the user base is of course hard and expensive, but also you need a team than can deal with a growing crowd 🔥 1 Sara Pinto Jul 28, 2022, 10:17 AM Unfortunately, our time is up! Thank you Adrian Krion for being part of this AMA. Any final thoughts you might want to share with our community? Adrian Krion Jul 28, 2022, 12:34 PM Thank you everyone for your awesome questions, it's been a privilege to connect with you! We are still in a nascent, developing space and this is an exciting time. Be courageous with your ideas and focus on building something valuable rather than on a promise of value. And of course, get in touch with me if you feel like we could create amazing things together!

Interoperability in NFT Games with Adrian Krion

Interoperabilidad en Juegos NFT con Adrian Krion

Interopérabilité dans les jeux NFT avec Adrian Krion

एड्रियन क्रियोन के साथ एनएफटी गेम्स में इंटरऑपरेबिलिटी

Adrian Krion との NFT ゲームの相互運用性

Interoperabilidade em jogos NFT com Adrian Krion

Khả năng tương tác trong Trò chơi NFT với Adrian Krion

与 Adrian Krion 在 NFT 游戏中的互操作性

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your  background. co-founder and CEO of , the first decentralized talent network. I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my adult life, and have founded a number of companies. Prior to Braintrust, I co-founded Doctor on Demand, the popular video telemedicine provider, with daytime talk show personality Dr. Phil. I’m Braintrust In between, I’ve invested in 100+ of companies and decentralized projects, including Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), TrustToken, Binance, Terra Luna, Uniswap, Placer, Aktana, Bolt, BlockFi, Basis, Filecoin, Placer, Skale Labs, Protocol Labs, JCTurbo, Apero Health, Rapportive, MyTime, Automatic, Womply, Superhuman, and Zenefits. What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? Braintrust is the first user-owned talent network that connects skilled, vetted knowledge workers with the world’s most reputable brands like Nestle, Nike, and NASA. The community that relies on Braintrust to find work are the same people who own and build it, ensuring the network always serves the needs of its users, instead of a centrally-controlled corporation. And because the community of knowledge workers and contributors earns ownership and control of Braintrust for its contributions to the network and its growth, new talent and jobs have been added at record speeds. What is the origin story? My co-founder Gabe and I have been building and investing in two-sided, web-enabled marketplaces our entire careers. We love the business model: create a trusted place to transact, ensure quality and reputation, build liquidity on both sides so buyers and sellers can meet, discover price and transact. It’s a beautiful thing, but traditionally they’ve been very capital-intensive to start. The old playbook involves raising a ton of VC investment and using it to subsidize one or both sides of the marketplace to achieve that liquidity. The problem: those investors (deservedly) need a return. Where does that return come from? Higher fees on the marketplace. Ever-increasing fees fuel a death spiral of misaligned incentives between the marketplace owner/operator and the users who make their living on the marketplace. Users start to disintermediate. Larger transactions are repelled, thus effectively capping growth as those hard-earned network effects erode. After building and investing in so many of these marketplaces, and then seeing the incentives diverge as they scale, we thought, “there must be a better way.” That better way is what we call the “ownership economy.” It is a revolutionary form of network ownership powered by a new technology: blockchain tokens. What makes user-owned networks different? No fees. If a network is owned by its users, why would they want to charge themselves high fees? By charging zero fees to the talent and nominal fees to clients, you keep incentives aligned, enabling a whole class of larger, ongoing transactions that make the network far more useful and valuable than a traditional high-fee marketplace. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? We’re a young company with just over a year of building in public under our belts, but we’ve invested heavily in our people and our culture. Both my co-founder and I have built a lot of businesses, so we know how vital it is to establish strong values and to carry those through from the abstract to the very real-world. We know how powerful ownership can be as a motivator and as a unifier. That’s why one of our values is “own it.” We want our community and our team to see themselves as the owners of the Braintrust network because they ARE the owners. So we’re building a successful business and then turning it over to the community to self-govern. A centrally-owned company would never turn its own investment into a public good, and it would never really let anyone else “own it.” We’re instilling that value because we see it as the only way to build a truly scalable and successful talent network that doesn’t end up extracting value from the people it’s meant to serve. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? If I weren’t building Braintrust, which disintermediates expensive labor marketplaces and staffing firms by giving the value they extract back to the talent, I’d be building Braintrust for “last mile delivery”, which would dismantle the extractionary waste machines like Uber and Postmates. These businesses do nothing but harm workers by pushing wages down and charge ludicrous fees which actually make their services MORE EXPENSIVE than the taxies/delivery people they displaced. It’s an economic disaster and they need to be replaced by user-owned networks. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? The whole point of Braintrust is to replace expensive middlemen who extract 30-80% of the value from the talent they connect to clients with a user owned marketplace that extracts nearly zero. So, the more Gross Services Volume (GSV) we drive through Braintrust, the more value we’ve taken from the fat middleman and given back to our users! Another key metric is referral rates. The more our community refers to the network, the more they are rewarded with BTRUST token, which is the sole instrument of control in our network. What’s most exciting about your traction to date? The most exciting part is probably how quickly some of the world’s biggest brands have rapidly adopted Braintrust as their starting point for finding product, design, and technical talent.  Nestle, Nike, athenahealth, Porsche, and TaskRabbit are all examples of big brands that have found success hiring on Braintrust. Why is this? It’s because we’ve managed to attract the best talent globally.  A lot of firms say that; why is it demonstrably true with Braintrust? Because, unlike all the other talent marketplaces and staffing firms out there, Braintrust takes ZERO FEES FROM THE TALENT. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the best talent are attracted to the best terms (own your reputation, pay no fees). Those talent bring in more and bigger clients who do large, ongoing projects instead of small, one-off ones. Those client names and projects draw in even more talent since talent don’t want to have to keep pitching client after client. Instead, they want flexible, interesting and ongoing projects.  The more projects talent complete, the more tokens they earn and thus the more control they have over the marketplace where they make their living. Flywheels are a beautiful thing! The other metric that points directly to our vision of spreading economic opportunity more equitably around the world is the hourly rate growth of our freelance community. Since the beginning of the year, that rate has jumped a full 15% to just under $100 an hour now. For a global network, that’s really exciting. We’re creating potentially life-changing incomes for a lot of people. What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why? Blockchain tokens are the most exciting technology of our time.  Sounds crazy and buzz-wordy, right? It’s not. Tokens allow for a whole new value creation and distribution model that is more fair to workers (knowledge and blue collar alike) and, frankly, better for business. Software is famously eating the world … and blockchain is eating the middleman. Blockchain tech enables User Owned Networks, and is rapidly proving that user owned networks grow faster and become more valuable to their users than investor owned networks. I don’t worry about any technology in particular, just how some technologies are being used. Saying “AI is bad” (as many do) is like saying hammers are bad. Sure, they can be used to harm, but also used to create. AI can be characterized this way as well:  self-driving cars will help save lives, AI radiology can catch cancers that doctors miss, and so on. On the flip side, the AI that drives Facebook’s algorithm to serve disinformation about elections and vaccines is most certainly harming society. That’s not the technology's fault. It’s the people running it. What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? I think it’s clear from my answers above how community-centric I am, as well as how much I believe in the entrepreneurial process as a means of surfacing real innovation. HackerNoon is effectively meeting right at the center of those two axes. It’s this place where anyone can come and learn without any sort of pretense or gatekeeping, while also maintaining an irreverent, let’s-not-take-this-whole-thing-too-seriously tone. In terms of bringing along the next generation of builders and true owners of the ecosystem, it’s irreplaceable. What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? Anyone can learn anything. Knowledge is not a barrier to entry. Don’t understand something and are afraid you could never be an expert at it? Wrong. Anyone who wants to learn badly enough can very quickly become an expert on anything. I learned that in my 30s. Would’ve been better at 21. Also... buy Bitcoin. What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? This year is a good example of it, but it comes up a decent amount in the technology space. The secular trends that ultimately shape how we do things here on planet earth may be pushed forward or pulled back by external forces like say, a global pandemic, but the arc of technology will always bend towards those trends. In the case of 2021, we’ve shifted a ton of attention to going back to the office, but the trend line has been moving towards decoupled, decentralized teams for some time now, and despite desires by some big companies like Apple, Google, or JPMorgan for a return to 2019, it’s simply not going to happen. From the moment mobile and cloud computing became something enterprise IT teams were taking into account in their planning and purchasing, this inflection point was coming, and it’s not going to go away after COVID is a distant memory. The tough part for all of us who don’t have a crystal ball is getting those big secular trends right. But having some conviction for those visionary bets will pay off: the ones you get right will change how people live their lives for a long, long time. Vote for San Francisco Startup of the Year!

What We Call the “Ownership Economy” with Braintrust CEO Adam Jackson

The blockchain is certainly an important tool that has no limits especially in the gaming world and therefore both the objects of the related game and the proceeds of the same, run on blockchain and can be monetized by anyone, receiving their own crypto in exchange. Unfortunately, there are not many games that are interesting or that we can like and in addition we must also know the relative reference blockchain and also have the correct crypto and wallet to interact with them without problems. But if there was a method to play traditional yokes and also recover crypto, wouldn't it be perfect? Well, a project has been launched, , which allows you to take advantage of traditional games, both on PC and on mobile, regardless of whether on Android or iOS, and recover crypto, in this case EOS, all simply and comfortably as a registration on the relevant platform. Womplay In fact, at Womplay it is possible to register with 4 different methods such as Google, Twitter, Facebook or Apple accounts, therefore open to almost everyone and then connect your EOS account, in fact Womplay is a platform created by the team behind the that has the advantage of creating an EOS account for free and then receiving the related EOS on the account we will create. Wombat wallet Once inside the platform, we will be able to choose the game that interests us, divided both by earning opportunities and by type of game, such as strategic, puzzle and so on, simply by clicking on the relevant game and then installing it through the appropriate link, in fact in this way Womplay will be able to track our progress in the game and award us prizes, which are called wombucks, every time we complete missions, and then as soon as we have received these wombucks, we will be able to exchange them for EOS, in fact not there is a minimum threshold to reach, and anyone can participate in the pool that will distribute the EOS, once a week, to those who have deposited their wombuks by simply pressing the "Join" button: We are not talking about simple and unknown games but about real games developed by promising teams, in fact some of these are: - Forge of Empire - Elvenar - Lords Mobile: Kingdom Wars - (for pc) Worlds of Warships Once we play the various games, we can go to our profile and see the wombucks won so far and also all the various EOS payouts that have been sent to our EOS account: As you can see, I myself have taken the trouble to test it and for several months, and all the payments that have been made to my EOS account, demonstrating that there are no tricks or deceptive systems, all based on the EOS blockchain. So not only will we be able to play our favorite games and in complete freedom, since many are right on smartphones, but by playing we will also be rewarded, going to close the circle and actually find ourselves in the " " situation but with crypto and therefore with an asset that could increase significantly over time. play to earn Imagine if at the dawn of the blockchain and bitcoin, you could recover BTC by playing a mobile game, now after 10 years, you would have a real heritage and who knows now history could repeat itself, so have fun everyone.

Get Paid To Play Oldie Games - Yes, You Heard That Right

I like to analyze my past work through the prism of evaluating my mistakes (I’m sure my therapist would have a field day with that one). I launched my first publicly available engineering project in early December and as George W. Bush once said, “Mistakes were made”. I studied CS at Carnegie Mellon for undergrad and as part of my classes I built a number of projects. But it’s one thing to build something for a class where maybe one or two people will use it for a brief period and another altogether to ship something for the general public. Upon graduation I worked at Google for 3 years where, as you can imagine, they make it pretty much impossible for junior engineers to royally screw anything up (though I still found a way to, but that’s a story for another day). After about a year of operating as a traditional recruiting agency (where we also made ), my co-founder (and twin) had learned enough to launch a free software product to help engineers find new jobs in a non-annoying and non-spammy way. For about three months I was heads down building our tool that would index open engineering jobs across the internet then hand-match an engineer to 5 job openings each month that matched their preferences and qualifications. plenty of mistakes While I was maniacally coding my brother was building our beta audience of early users. By the time we were ready to launch we had 142 users completely signed up and ready to receive our job recommendations (we’ll talk about the mistakes we made in building that audience in our next post). After launching it took me all of a minute to realize I made a big mistake. Talk about a let-down. All-in-all our beta launch has been a success. We’ve gotten really positive feedback from our early users, we know exactly what features we need to work on next, and we have a better sense of what kind of engineers find the most utility out of our tool. But my goal here is to highlight the engineering mistakes I made to help you avoid the same ones when you launch your next project. I also want to have this as a reference so I never repeat these errors. 1. Didn't test properly (or the horrible, no good, very bad start) In order to receive job recommendations from us you have to complete a basic form so we know what kind of engineering roles you’re looking for and where. Now, before we had that form built we threw up a landing page and collected emails to see if people would be interested in what we were building. When the signup form was ready we emailed our mailing list prompting them to complete that form. This was a really big moment for us. Anyone who completed the form would officially receive our job recommendations! My brother wrote the email, nervously hit send, and less than two minutes later we had four emails letting us know the form didn’t work. Womp womp. This was one of the lowest moments in our company’s history. We never wanted to be a recruiting agency. We did that for a year to learn what software product we could build to help engineers learn about new jobs. When we were in the drudges of recruiting the launch of a software product was the light at the end of the tunnel. So now, in our first big moment for that product, something was wrong. We tested that form. We tested it robustly with different inputs. We really, really tried to break it. So what happened? When I built the signup form I had to change the way our backend was structured. When we were just collecting email addresses we didn’t need much of a schema. But now we had users and attributes about those users so we needed a real database structure. When the new schema was built we migrated all of the people who signed up with their emails to this new schema. When these people then tried to complete our signup form they got an error saying “this user already exists”. When we had tested the form we only tested it with new email addresses not in our system. Luckily, we were able to quickly fix the error (after 5 minutes of pure panic) with the help of these very generous early adopters. This seems like such an egregious error in hindsight. It’s funny, I’m a solid developer but when working on this project I was juggling so many balls in the air that I made some basic mistakes. At Google I was bowling with bumpers. When those bumpers got removed it’s like I had to re-learn some of the basics. Some things you only really learn by messing them up and I can assure you I won’t make this mistake again. 2. DevOps will be the death of me Let me preface this section by saying I don’t know anything about DevOps. As in, I almost never deployed code to my own server. So when building this project I was looking for a service where I could push code to production and our site just worked with little tuning or configuration involved on my end. I worked on the Google Cloud team during my Google tenure so I figured that’s what I should use when launching this project. This was a mistake (I’ll expound on the reasons why next). The overall lesson here is that I should have avoided the and ditched GCP when there were early signs that it wasn’t what I was looking for. sunk cost fallacy My experience with GCP and AppEngine was not at all what I wanted. I assumed that AppEngine would be flexible enough to easily cater to our stack (Django, Angular, and at the time MySQL). I also assumed that AppEngine and any other Google Cloud Product like CloudSQL would work nicely together with little configuration. I just got too many errors I didn't know how to handle and there was little documentation or support online when you Googled (or DuckDuckGod or Bingd or AltaVistad) the error. The straw that broke the camel's back and forced us to switch off GCP was the inability to deploy code to production for two weeks. I have a feeling if you know what you're doing, the user-experience of using AWS vs Azure vs GCP is largely the same (though I could be wrong about this). What's frustrating is that even though I'm directly in the demographic of people these platforms want to attract, they don't focus much attention on me. We’ve since switched to Heroku and I no longer worry about making sure our site stays up and running. It’s a bit more expensive (about $125 a month for us vs $50 for Google) but I place the value of my time and mental well-being at greater than $75 a month so we’re okay with this trade-off. 3. Got a case of "shiny object syndrome" If you frequent forums or podcasts about startups I’m sure the phrase “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) has lost all meaning to you. It’s used so commonly to describe vastly different products and product stages that it has just become another space on the board of “startup bingo”. To me, the fundamental idea of an MVP is to build the most basic version of your product to test if people will use it and to learn how to improve that product for the next version. If there is a prevailing hypothesis in this blog post it is the gap between reading and doing is the size of the Grand Canyon. Sure, I knew that v1 of what I was building should be pared down as much as possible. If you look at the original list of features we thought needed to be in this version I would say we got 90% of the way there. Still, I let a cool engineering/math challenge inflate the work I should have done. In our first version of the product my tool would whittle down thousands of engineering jobs for a given person to a list of about 30 jobs based on qualifying factors like location, job title, years of experience, etc... Then, from that list my co-founder and I would manually select 5 jobs each month that we thought were the best fit for that person. You know what we didn’t need for this version? A convoluted way to score and sort the remaining list of 40-50 jobs to save us time in choosing the top 5. I spent a lot of time coming up with a clever way to weight factors that I thought mattered to engineers in determining if a given job is what they’re looking for. As it turns out, the data we were automatically collecting on all of these jobs was not yet clean or standardized enough to make that score meaningful. We quickly scrapped this ranking system because there was no correlation between the score and the likelihood we would choose a job for a given engineer. All in, this took me about two days to develop which would have been way better spent getting our product in front of users earlier to start getting feedback. Mistakes were made - a reflection I hope that reading this will help save you time and angry typing into your computer when you launch your next project. I know I’ll continue to mess up, it’s just the nature of trying to build something new. What I want to avoid at all costs is messing up in the same way over and over. So I’ll write these posts on a semi-regular basis. I’ll also try to write about some of my successes because despite the premise of this article, things are going pretty well for us right now! We have users who really like our product and we’re solving a problem in a space we think is completely dysfunctional for job seekers. Until my next post, happy building. Previously published at https://www.beamjobs.com/blog/how-i-botched-my-companys-launch-after-leaving

Bye Bye Google: How I Botched My Company's Launch After Leaving

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Sanely Enabling TLS using CertManager/LetsEncrypt with Jenkins X's ExposeController on every Preview build If you're on the train, chances are you're loving the preview builds. Jenkins X With every single Pull Request you make, as part of Jenkins X's integration with Kubernetes, a "Preview Environment" is spun up, and posted to your open PR with a comment and a link that you can click to see the running version of the changes you just made. Great for fast visual validation that things are looking, and working as intended. Under the hood, these preview environments are powered by Helm. specifically, without the use of the server side component Tiller. Jenkins X is nice enough to wire this up, and create Helm charts for you. Chances are, you've also wanted to set up HTTPS. No problem, there's a command for that. jx upgrade ingress --cluster After a rather long series of saying yes over and over, you have certificates! "Success!" you shout, as you make a winning motion with your fist. And so you go on with life, but only for a short while. As you're happily awaiting your magical preview link something happens! Which something that is depends on your configuration and version, but it's not a working SSL cert, that's for sure! Either you get a build error that the preview status could not be determined and something about a certificate, or you get a successful build, only to open up chrome to an invalid cert. error: error checking preview application https://*.com is available if Or maybe the dreaded "Privacy Error": What happened!? I thought we upgraded the certs! And so, you begin to dig. You find closed PRs that say it's fixed, and references to a or or or maybe even setting and try several variations of that set to true and none of those work, and what about turning this http setting off? Nothing works. tls-acme tlsacme tlsAcme TLSAcme Eventually you look more closely at the logs and see it never used any of your values anyway. So then you go read the source code and you see and and so you're just more confused now cause where do go modules even come from anyway? tls-acme tlsacme TLSAcme So then you go learn Go and how it's module system works, at least, enough to read it, and figure out that make preview is calling this and has a flag called that you can set to true from the command line, so you try that! tls-acme You modify your pipeline to append to it. --tls-acme=\"true\" A few minutes pass as you anxiously await the results of your pipeline. 9th times a charm, right? Annnnd! DEPRECATED! WOMP WOMP! You saw it in the code, but hoped it would work anyway. It does leave a clue, however. Flag --tls-acme has been deprecated, please use after install instead `jx upgrade ingress` Feeling defeated you head over to your Jenkinsfile, and add the line: sh "jx upgrade ingress" Alas, it needs user input, as you already knew. To solve this, we need the flag. --batch-mode And with that, we will find one more issue, a missing helm repository: . jenkins-x That can be fixed easy enough by adding: sh "helm repo add jenkins-x https://storage.googleapis.com/chartmuseum.jenkins-x.io" Using batch mode, turns out, it does get some config from a ConfigMap that's been created in the development namespace, which is by default, and a team name if you are using that feature. But not everything. jx apiVersion: v1
data:
  clusterissuer: domain: yourdomain.com
  email: youremail@yourdomain.com
  exposer: Ingress
  issuer: letsencrypt-prod
  tls: urltemplate: kind: ConfigMap "false" "true" "" For the rest, we can pass in some flags. Here's the full final Jenkinsfile stage. stage( ) { {
    branch } {
    TEAM = PREVIEW_VERSION = PREVIEW_NAMESPACE = .toLowerCase()
    HELM_RELEASE = .toLowerCase()
    FULL_PREVIEW_NAMESPACE = .toLowerCase()
  } {
    container( ) {
      sh sh dir( ) {
        sh sh sh sh }
    }
  }
} 'CI Build and push snapshot' when 'PR-*' environment "jx" "0.0.0-SNAPSHOT- - " $BRANCH_NAME $BUILD_NUMBER " - " $APP_NAME $BRANCH_NAME " " $PREVIEW_NAMESPACE " - - - " $TEAM $ORG $APP_NAME $BRANCH_NAME steps 'nodejs' "export VERSION= && skaffold build -f skaffold.yaml" $PREVIEW_VERSION "jx step post build --image / / : " $DOCKER_REGISTRY $ORG $APP_NAME $PREVIEW_VERSION './charts/preview' "make preview" "jx preview --app --dir ../.." $APP_NAME "helm repo add jenkins-x https://storage.googleapis.com/chartmuseum.jenkins-x.io" "jx upgrade ingress --batch-mode --namespaces= --services= --wait-for-certs=false --skip-resources-update=true --skip-certmanager=true" $FULL_PREVIEW_NAMESPACE $APP_NAME And with that, the preview pull request now creates a cert after the preview environment is successfully created! It may take around 60 seconds or so for the cert to be created after the completion of the build. There are a few caveats to this, such as when you are using a custom urlTemplate for the preview environment. In that case you'd need to adjust the environment variable I've added . Another one is if you are using the feature, you'll need to make sure you update that environment variable as well. FULL_PREVIEW_NAMESPACE teams Happy Hacking! Make sure to follow me on here if that's still a thing, and on twitter ! @pat_scott ~ Patrick Lee Scott If you're looking to learn for yourself, the best place to start is reading about my own journey, which I'm imagining is quite similar to yours! At the end you'll find a FREE 21 day email course called "Getting Dangerous with DevOps!"

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