Interview with Louthing from MatchboxDAO - By the Chinese Starknet Community (English Version)

Enjoy this interesting interview with Louthing from MatchboxDAO (English Version)

MatchboxDAO Interview - English

This Interview was carried out by the StarkNet Chinese Community

Let’s give them a follow here and have a look at their linktr.ee.

About MatchboxDAO

Q: When did you begin your Crypto Journey?

A: I started 6-7 years ago. Around 2017. My brother was already very into cryptography but I had a more standard approach. I was holding btc, eth and playing around with some altcoins, nothing very original. Then I joined one of the largest crypto community chat at that time in France, started to deep dive into it, and ended up being one of the administrators of that group. Then I joined the investment team of Greenfield, one of the largest crypto VCs in Europe. In the meantime I was very into “Zero Knowledge Proof” related topics thanks to my brother, as mentioned previously, and Starkware products in particular (Starkex and Starknet), then deep dived further into within the on-chain gaming environment with MatchboxDAO

Q: Personally what games do you like the most?

A: I’ve been playing a lot of game in my childhood. I am a kid of the 90s, so I’ve been very into all the Zeldas, Mario, also the Playstation classics, played the GTA series a lot and also the classic mmorpg. I also played a lot of computer classic games. I couldn’t say how much time I’ve spent playing video games, I’m definitely not the worse as I wasn’t the biggest World of Warcraft fan but I’ve still played a lot haha.

Q: Could you introduce us a bit to MatchboxDAO and its team?

A: We are the largest community of developers on Starknet (even if we’re chain agnostic). We aim at building the infrastructure of fully on-chain games. We raised 7.5 milions from top investors including: Starkware, Delphi, 1kx, Bitkraft, Fabric Ventures, Geometry, Lemniscap, Big Brains Holdings, Formless Capital, Mask Network and many others.

We incubate on-chain games as well as encourage projects to start building OnChain.

Although we now focus on building a new category of Esports with on-chain gaming where developers will be the new stars in games you need to code to be able to play. In that regard we launched 0xTitans, a Web3 gaming competition around 0xMonaco the famous racing CTF from Paradigm where your car is a smart contract and you need to code the best strategy by buying relevant resources (acceleration, bananas, shells, shield) with the predefined amount of token you have. Each race is composed of three cars. In January on the first edition we had the best web3 companies participating including: Uniswap, Ledger, Polygon, OKX, NEAR Protocol, Yield Guild Games, Bybit, Mask Network and many others…

Q: Why do you choose Starknet even when its mainnet isn’t ready? How do you see Starknet in the long run?

A: We are technically chain agnostic but most of what we do is on Starknet due to the features that Starknet offers (computation power, account abstractions, finest language to leverage ZKP features…) and also because the most promising games are on Starknet.

Q: How did you come up with the idea to make a DAO working on gaming?

A: The community makes it all. It is the key. There is nothing stronger than a community which led to having a DAO. It was a no brainer

OnChain games

Q: In your mind, what is onchain game? How is it going to be different?

A: Contrary to STEPN or Axie for instance where 90+% of the game is off-chain. A fully on-chain game is a game where all the components are fully on-chain. From the gameplay to the AMM if there is a marketplace in the game including also the music tooling or any other effects in the game, everything is on-chain and can be divided into as many bricks as you can imagine like legos.

It changes it all because it allows any dev to be able to build a game in the friction of the time he would have needed if he had to do it by himself.

Also, it allows compound effects as more and more developers will contribute as the existing bricks will always be improved and updated. This will allow any dev to have access to the super high-quality bricks only. Somehow bringing the same as DeFi with an infinity of potential dApps possible.

Contrary to web2 games where everything is in silos and not composable.

Q: What’s the stage of on-chain games right now? What are you focusing on?

A: Getting as many games as possible to be built. And aware of as many developers and viewers as possible especially through on-chain gaming competition.

Q: How do you incubate games and help them with fruition-process?

A: We give them money to develop. We connect them to investors or to relevant people within the industry. We also organize hackathons where participants can build on top of their game to improve it and add new features. We also bring them a user base with the organization of competitions

Q: How many games have you been involved with? Which ones do you see potential?

A: I couldn’t name them all. But in general most of the founder building on Starknet are very smart already from having been trhough the barrier at entry which is learning Cairo. But some very promising games are Mystis, Starknet Odyssey, Lost in Cairo, Influence, Realms, NOGame, DopeWars, Topology, Age of Eykar, Dark Forest etc… and many more but I couldn’t name them all.

On DAOs

Q: Have you gotten any obstacles when working on MatchboxDAO? How do you overcome them?

A: Startups are always challenging in terms of growth, results and speed so sometimes it’s stressful but for the best.

Q: How does MatchboxDAO work as a DAO? What’d the process of decision making?

A: We work as a team and try to engage as much with the community by always getting feedback as we are a real DAO with a token at the moment but would be the case anytime soon.

Q: What’s the mission of MatchboxDAO in the long term?

A: Power and help builders build fully on-chain games both from a technical perspective through a good infrastructure and new esports where devs will compete against each other and the mainstream audience will watch them.

On Development

Q: Until now, what are the most successful hachathons or events that you have held?

A: Every hackathons we organize is always bigger so the last one was in partnership with Mask Network.

Q: As a developers, designers or users, how could we contribute to the development of a game?

A: By engaging within the DAO, understanding what’s missing and try to resolve it. Hackathons are a great way to kickstart.

Q: Do you have any suggestions to newcomers and devs who are interested in Starknet but don’t know how to start yet?

A: You should do the OnlyDust and Starkware tutorials. They are very pedagogical and, once completed then I would suggest to participate to hackathons or start building something while coming to physical meetups/conferences and, once the project is kickstarted, reach out to the Starkware team and discuss with them (in particular with Louis, Ecosystem Lead).