From Primitive Minds to Futuristic Gaming: Amar Bedi's Vision for a Seamless Web3 Experience

The human brain is very primitive, believes Amar Bedi, CEO of Tashi Gaming. As a result, he says, it is focused very much on the immediate.

“This was apparent in the financial industry where I first began my career. Professionals were focused on short-term strategies and goals limited to  monthly or quarterly earnings. So, my move to technology excited me as I could see that not only was the thinking long term – out to ten years or more – but the innovations were life changing.”

Bedi, an accountant by training, grew up in Delhi and was working at one of the big four accountancy firms before transitioning to investment banking. He began investing in the technology space and hasn’t looked back, fifteen years on.

“Consider the impact technology has on people – the smartphone for example. Smartphones are both ubiquitous and addictive. People working in the technology sector are actively innovating and projecting how  things might be in ten, twenty or even fifty years’ time.”

Despite the pace of change, Bedi also sees patterns which include tipping points. When AI is considered, the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 is seen as the tipping point, but the reality is that AI has existed and been worked on in one avatar or another for the past fifty years.

“Slow, slow then fast.”

Bedi sees the adoption of blockchain happening in the same way.

“It’s not yet adopted by the masses, but once the average person benefits from blockchain it will become as ubiquitous as the smartphone. Consider the usage of stablecoins, if these came into common parlance then the days of the Wild West of crypto will be quickly forgotten.

“For emerging tech to develop there are thousands of hours of research and innovation that the public is rarely exposed to. New technology is only adopted when it’s useful and administered with ease.”

Bedi’s attraction to blockchain was not driven by Bitcoin. He was aware of Bitcoin since 2016, but despite having a financial background he was not overly interested. It was only once he started learning about the technology underpinning Bitcoin and distributed ledgers that the penny dropped and his entrepreneurial journey began.

“We are still in the very early days of using blockchain and cryptocurrencies and there is plenty of friction. It’s not easy to buy currencies and it’s not easy to convert it back to Fiat. I’d say it is still a good five years out from becoming a stable, accessible and easy to use technology.”

As an entrepreneur moving from Web2 into Web3, Bedi sees the pace of development accelerate. An entrepreneur in Web2 first builds product and then finds customers. In Web3, the customers and community come first.

“There is so much value in having a community and readily getting feedback. At the end of the day, as an entrepreneur you are serving someone and the more you understand your community, the faster you can solve their problems and become successful at the same time.”

Growing up, Bedi was a gamer, playing everything from World of Warcraft to FIFA but now, as a full-time entrepreneur and father to a young daughter, he doesn’t get much time to play.

Interestingly, as the CEO of a Web3 gaming protocol, he doesn’t view Web2 games as having many problems akin to Web3. Games can always be improved and the developers in Web2 are also gamers which makes for great games.

“But the problems Web3 games claim to be solving do not really matter to Web2 gamers as up until now the solutions have introduced friction that makes them unattractive to Web2 folk. It’s a factor of the newness of blockchain. People building in Web3 suddenly thought they could add value – such as ingame ownership of items – but the solutions were clunky and instead added a layer of friction. It has caused a schism of sorts between the two sectors.”

Bedi continues to point out that not every game requires points and rewards, but it does need to be fun.

In his role at Tashi Gaming, he talks about their Hippocratic Oath devised by their CTO Ken Anderson which replaces the word harm with friction – ie add no friction.

“We are thinking about player experiences at Tashi. We start with our technology and we want to make it seamless in a game so the players have no idea that they are playing on blockchain tech. It’s the same in Web2, I don’t know or care if my multiplayer game uses a cloud service such as AWS – I just want to play my game.”

Going back to one of the oft-hyped features of Web3, that of ingame ownership, Bedi says that is not always an issue. He likes to play chess, but he doesn’t see how ownership of a fancy chess piece or board can come first at the cost of the game experience.

“Other games do require a buildup of armory of assets perhaps in World of Warcraft and ownership would be beneficial. Another issue, which is growing in importance, is attribution for player data. If I play a lot then I am giving gaming companies data which they can sell to advertising companies. It’s my data and ideally, I should be able to monetize my own data.

“These elements are not necessarily killer features but ones I see as vitamins…strong vitamins.”

Another benefit of adding in blockchain is the elimination of cheating. While cheating is not too prevalent in hyper casual gaming- again noting that blockchain is not the answer to all Web2 gaming problems- but there are certain games which would benefit.

“In Web3 we need two-third of the players to agree on what we term ‘game states’. If someone tries to cheat, the system will recognize such an attempt and the other players will be able to say ‘that’ did not happen, where ‘that’ might be an addition of health, wealth or strength in the game.

“Gaming should be fair and accessible to everyone – and that is a massive advantage we can bring to the table.”

One issue for Web2 game publishers is cloud costs because compute is very expensive, especially the egress. Tashi Gaming can slash that cost by 50% to 60% as we reduce the need for expensive centralized servers.

“That is a massive saving for games that spend millions of dollars in cloud infrastructure.”

Tashi Gaming is partnering with industry leaders including Nvidia, AltLayer, and Aethir. It has partnered with Indonesia’s largest e-streaming service accounting for five million plus users, and it is in talks with many leading Web3 gaming studios.

Tashi Gaming has also launched a Tashi Elite Program to offer game developers a white glove treatment to use the Tashi tech.

“Game developers are focused on building games so we want to help support them in the back end journey, but we can also deliver ecosystem benefits including introductions to VCs and different Web3 protocols. We want to help.”

Tashi Gaming is planning a node sale in the coming months to engage the wider gaming ecosystem. The aim is to allow developers in the ecosystem to use the technology with a single click – making it both useful and easy to use.

Bedi reckons in five years, Tashi will be the leading Web3 back-end infrastructure platform.

“When anyone says Web3 gaming infrastructure – they’ll think of Tashi.”