Several heavily armed security guards stand at the entrance to the Solana Hacker House in a relatively empty part of Miami's Wynwood neighborhood on an evening in early April, the week the big Bitcoin conference is taking place in South Beach.
These are no ordinary security guards. With their muscles bulging overhead and their bulletproof vests filled with ammunition, their intensity belies the very innocuous scene behind the metal detectors - essentially a large group of nerds discussing blockchain development in an open-air event space punctuated by Fun Dimension, a giant arcade.
But these nerds could own a lot of cryptocurrencies.
This article is part of Road to Consensus, a series that features speakers and the big ideas they'll be discussing at Consensus 2022, the CoinDesk festival June 9-12 in Austin, Texas. Learn more.
The nerd I want to meet here is Michael Wagner, co-founder and CEO of Star Atlas, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game his team developed on the Solana Blockchain. It made its debut in January.
It's a highly ambitious project that's still in its early stages (according to Wagner, there are about 160,000 people in the Star Atlas channel on the messaging app Discord so far). Players can access the game's first module, which includes limited gameplay and the purchase of non-fungible tokens (NFT) assets.
Star Atlas includes a science fiction storyline that takes place in the year 2620, with graphics befitting a triple-A (read: high-budget) game. Three warring factions compete for valuable resources on the discovered planet Iris, using the game currency Atlas to buy ships and other virtual items to achieve their goals and live their virtual lives.
The game's metacurrency is Polis, which players use to control the game through hierarchical, decentralized, autonomous organizations (DAOs). From the local to the regional to the top level, they mimic something like the structure of federal, state and local governments.
"We look at what we're building at Star Atlas almost like an independent nation-state," Wagner says, after finding me between two separate groups of security guards, one guarding the entrance to the Hacker House and the other guarding the VIP area (which we can't enter, although Wagner has a badge, since I don't have one and the security guards aren't taking any chances).
It will even be possible to earn a living through Star Atlas' play-to-earn features, similar to Axie Infinity, but with endless possibilities that players can create themselves. If players can't afford or earn enough Atlas to buy their own spaceship, someone else in the game can become a sort of Uber driver in space, taking them from planet to planet in exchange for game coins that they can eventually convert to money if they want.
"We're buildinga kind of global country and a virtual economy so that people can participate in this grandiose vision," Wagner acknowledges, "but there's real potential.
Who is Wagner to claim such a grandiose vision? Wearing red pants and a white Miami-style Solana shirt covering his broad shoulders, he introduces himself with a disarming smile as "a big proponent of Bitcoin" as we take our seats at an umbrella-covered wooden table (surrounded by other umbrella-covered wooden tables on a sea of fake grass).
Wagner recently relocated to Miami from another party town, Las Vegas - but he's here to build his game.
"There's an energy and vibe here that's very supportive and conducive to building cryptocurrencies," he says. The Solana Hacker House alone drew between 1,000 and 5,000 people the day we met, he estimates.
Pablo Quiroga, Atlas' co-founder and chief revenue officer, moved to the city a few months earlier, and Estefan Ramirez Vazquez, the company's newly hired head of growth, also now lives in Miami.
But the company is global, with nearly 200 employees in 26 countries, from New Zealand to Central Africa.
"Discord is basically our headquarters," Wagner explains. Although it's difficult to attract the limited number of talented and in-demand Rust engineers to a blockchain company, Star Atlas hasn't had much trouble. According to Wagner, management receives daily emails from qualified engineers interested in working with the team, and has hired 45 people so far, most of whom are primarily developing blockchain products.
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Wagner himself is not a software engineer. "Gaming and PC building were my path into the crypto world," he says.
In fact, he and his high school friends were so passionate about games and computers in the 1990s that they formed a group called LANarchists to share their common passion. ("We were all very nerdy ... I'm proud of it, actually," he says, looking like he's outgrown his nerdy ways and now goes to the gym regularly).
About a decade after high school, one of the guys in that group told Wagner about crypto and mining using graphics processors.
"He had built this milk crate system with three GPUs," Wagner recalls. "And I was like, 'This is definitely something I can do.
At the time, Wagner was working in traditional finance, essentially managing portfolios. He immediately recognized the parallels between the markets he was working in and the emerging cryptocurrency markets. In 2015, he quit his "regular job" and switched to working full-time in the crypto space. In 2016, he founded his first company in Nevada called Tokes. Even the name reveals that the company was located at the "intersection of crypto and cannabis," Wagner describes - a particularly tricky intersection at the time.
"It was a tough sell," he says. Although cannabis had become legal in Nevada, it remained illegal at the federal level, which meant retail businesses couldn't use the traditional banking system. Providing these businesses with a crypto token seemed like a natural solution to the problem, but crypto was stigmatized at the time because of its underground association with Silk Road, and licenses to sell cannabis were limited in Nevada. No one wanted to risk losing their own licenses by accepting cryptocurrencies.
Wagner and his co-founders, Daniel and Jacob Floyd (both now with Star Atlas), decided to take a different approach. Instead of approaching cannabis retailers, they went straight to the Nevada state legislature and met with dozens of politicians, eventually passing Assembly Bill 466.
"This established an optional, tokenized, closed-loop financial ecosystem for cannabis," Wagner says. "What we would accomplish with this is the creation of a private stablecoin within the state."
Unfortunately, that legislation passed not long before COVID-19, and just as Tokes was picking up steam, the team's work was put on hold. Wagner and his team members began to wonder, "What else is going on in the crypto world?" The answers were "DeFi (decentralized finance), NFTs and blockchain gaming," Wagner says. "And we're all gamers."
And as an active return farmer in DeFi, Wagner saw the inherent gamification in lending and moving funds around to find the optimal spread. He even goes so far as to call DeFi "the first gamification product in the crypto world" ... "It's not about running around with a sword and killing a monster, but there were some game mechanics."
Wagner credits Daniel Floyd, now Star Atlas' chief product officer, with much of the game's concept. He's largely responsible for the plot, which revolves around the three battling interplanetary factions, the alien Oni, the armored Usters and the humanoid Mud. But their first company, Tokes, is still breathing - active but "somewhat dormant," as Wagner puts it. They even plan to potentially incorporate it into Star Atlas.
"We're going to bring Tokes into the metaverse as an artisanal cannabis community," Wagner says, by creating a product that players can "use in the game." When I ask if there is an "IRL (in real life) component" to this, Wagner continues.
"There's a very real potential and a high likelihood that people will make their digital purchases in 3D environments rather than shopping on a 2D site. You log into your avatar, maybe play a game or meet up with friends, and while you're sitting there talking, you're going through your shopping list at the same time," he says. "Then you pay with digital currency, and the goods are delivered to where you live. There's nothing to stop that from happening."
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Buying physical cannabis from a virtual store in Star Atlas is still a long way from becoming a reality. In another area of the Hacker House, past food carts with empanadas and among other "NFT Metaverse" exhibitors, the game company has a booth with several screens showing off Star Atlas' high-quality animations - the most the company has been able to show publicly.
The ships look like vehicles from "Star Wars" or perhaps from the Star Citizen video game that inspired Daniel Floyd's vision for the game. Quiroga hangs on the screens and says he first met Wagner in Nevada. While waiting in line behind him at a coffee shop, Quiroga noticed his bike keychain - they're both cyclists and started riding together, and during one of those earlier rides, Wagner introduced Quiroga to Blockchain.
Wagner seems to have sold Quiroga on blockchain as easily as he sold the idea of Star Atlas to the co-founders of Solana ("I don't think it would be a stretch to say that Star Atlas is one of the flagship projects being built on Solana," Wagner says) and brought in crypto exchange FTX as an onboarding partner for the game (Wagner had initially considered building the game on Solana after hearing FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried talk about it on a podcast).
Ultimately, the Star Atlas team chose Solana because it's a "highly scalable" network. That's key, as Wagner said he believes "gaming will bring the next billion users to cryptocurrency."
He also mentions the ability to create more complex systems in Solana, which offers low transaction costs along with limited lag time in gaming scenarios. "If you're running around shooting a bullet and it doesn't shoot and then you die, you're pissed," he says.
The game needs to run smoothly - after all, the goal is to create a triple-A game on a blockchain that appeals to current players as well as crypto-natives and players in the developing world.
In addition, Wagner and his team want the game to be as immersive as possible - both a fun escape for players, but also truly another world they can live in, a place where they can buy cannabis and govern their communities, and have a virtual job making real money.
"All the activities that are happening online now are going to be replicated in some way in these immersive, three-dimensional digital worlds," Wagner says.
That means the problems that exist in the physical world can easily be transferred to Star Atlas. For example, it is envisioned that assets in Star Atlas will range from the fiat equivalent of $15 to huge multipurpose ships that could be auctioned off for as much as $5 million or $10 million, Wagner speculates. In other words, real-world wealth will affect social stratification in the game - but he sees a Web 3 solution to that.
"This is where cryptocurrencies and Web 3 are very powerful, because the idea of pooled capital will be very possible via smart contracts in a trustless way," he explains.
Players could form collectives to buy expensive ships as a group, and rich ship owners can hire other players and pay them real money to run their $10 million ship in the metaverse. While Wagner acknowledges that none of this can eliminate social stratification, the game can "enable people to work together more freely."
This is all very hard to digest - a Metaverse that is an entirely fictional sci-fi game where people can get real jobs and, yes, even hire Web 3-savvy musicians to put on real (but digital) concerts that people/avatars can attend if they have the right digital tokens paid for with IRL fiat currency. They can create DAOs to buy ships or make political decisions in this fake reality that can potentially decide their fortunes in real life.
These are the many possibilities Wagner lists as we sit in this snow globe of a Solana pop-up in the middle of a desolate Miami neighborhood heavily guarded by security guards, none of whom we can see from our perch on the artificial grass. It all makes you think: Is it a problem when people become too far removed from their physical surroundings, too immersed in a false reality, so that the line between what's real and what's fabricated blurs beyond recognition?
For Wagner, that's not a problem. "Creating a place where people can escape to is probably beneficial," he says. "If you talk to Elon Musk - and I would agree with that - we are very likely living in a simulation anyway.
Star Atlas could also be the next iteration. "We're building something that we think will live 100 years or more if it's done right," Wagner says. "It's a step in the process of bringing people into this new world."