Meet at the Clubhouse

And you see, like I see the ape church team requesting when I tap on their names, Elon is like, fuck you, I can't add them to the stage. Okay, good. I just try to bring him up right now, just saying it. You know, balancing three computers at the same time is quite a delicate dance to make sure you don't turn off the spaces by accident. So that's part of the dance this morning. We got the team up now with Honey Bee leading the gospel church music. Always appreciate that. We got DeFi Mark up here early, early, and we got the ape church official page. So before we introduce the team, we do have a lot to get into. We want to get started with our friends at ape church. They got a lot of cool things happening this weekend. So we want to first ask you guys to follow ape church, the main account if you haven't already. That's just a simple request from me. But let's go to DeFi Mark. Let's chat about what you guys are building, man. Let's hear because I think a lot of apes don't know. The church is not actually a church. I mean, it is in a sense, but let Mark, I'm a third to you. Why don't you tell us what's up with ape church? What is it? What are you guys building there? Absolutely. How's it going guys? Can you guys hear me? Good morning. Good morning. GM, brother Mark. GM, brother Mark. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. It's definitely a record for me in terms of getting up early. I'm on dev hours usually. So I'll wake up like six hours past this, but I had to make it here for you guys. Can everyone hear me? Yeah, we got you. All right, awesome. Yeah. So ape church is, in my opinion, the coolest on-chain protocol that I've seen, like this cycle or in general, what it is is it's a fully on-chain app. So just like anything you'd see back in 22, et cetera, but it's got a twist. It is the, in my opinion, the first and only real implementation of a fully decentralized peer-to-peer eye gaming platform where you can play games of chance entirely on-chain, 100% on-chain. You can see all the code. It's fully open source, exactly where the money is moving, how it works, and you play against other people. So you always hear at like a casino that the house always wins. In this protocol, the house isn't us. It's not ape church. It's a fully open public staking pool that anyone can throw their money into or take it out of permissionlessly. We have no ownership over it. And the people playing games are playing against that pool of funds. There's a lot of protections in place. There's a lot of stuff. It's a huge protocol. Hundreds of smart contracts. It's been running for almost a year now. Since November, I believe, is when we officially went live with it. And yeah, it's done a lot of transactions on ape chain. I think about like seven million transactions on-chain have done because every single click on the platform is an on-chain transaction. Now we have a lot of things on there to make it fast. Like you can use a social wallet so you don't have to approve every time. But you can even just connect with your Metamask. And you'll see every time you play a game or click something, it's an on-chain call. But given that ape chain is just so quick with 250 milliseconds of block time, it doesn't really feel like it. It really is just, it feels like a real online experience, especially using a social wallet so you don't have to approve every time. But it is just one of the coolest protocols, man. You got everything. You got blackjack. Of course you got poker, which is one of the things we're talking about today. You got tons of different games. You got tons of different games on there. You even got social blackjack, which is the coolest thing in my opinion. The coolest smart contract to ever exist. I might be biased, but in my opinion, it is. You can sit with like four of your buddies and play against a dealer. And all have the same shoe. You can all play together, win together, et cetera. It's just cool, man. If you guys down there, like on-chain stuff, like the DeFi primitives, and that's really what it's built off of is DeFi primitives because the whole eye gaming industry in general is super centralized in every way and super greedy. So what ape chain to be was the DeFi version of all that. It really except DeFi roots and primitives and ideologies with it. So that's why everything's open source. You can see where your money moves. You don't deposit in and it's non-custodial. You just connect a wallet. When you play a game, you throw your money into the contract. When you win, the money goes right back to your wallet. There's no withdrawal process or anything. It is literally just you playing on-chain against a pool of funds funded by a bunch of other people. It's a very interesting concept. It's really cool. You can play. Since it's fully on-chain, you don't even need to play through the website. You can play through a terminal or apescan if you were savvy enough. Yo, yo, Mark, I got to jump in here two seconds because I got to do something that I'm foolish to not have said at the beginning is, please guys share the pen tweet up above so other people can hear about how amazing this, I don't even know what to call it. This protocol, this gaming world, all this fun and chaos that the ape church is building for us. There's many aspects to it. I want to give you a little appreciation of some ape who just played it one day and had a ton of fun. I like playing that the Blackjack was every decision, was an action on-chain. I had to really think about it. You guys had these little things built in that would give you tips on how to play this hand if you didn't know how to. You told me at a certain point, if you had agents, you could set up your agent to play and it's all on-chain and it's all real and it's all there. You guys just keep elevating your build over and over and over and over and recently, I saw you guys say that you're doing social Blackjack. Can you explain maybe what social Blackjack is and what some of these games are and how you guys involve community members into your games? Every time I look on your page, if you guys haven't gone to the ape church page, I highly recommend it. It is one of those protocols that it seems to be giving love to so many different ape chain projects on there. What's that about? I would love to learn about all these aspects. Absolutely. For social Blackjack side, there's a lot of social games coming out soon and when we say social game, what we mean is there are, it's still 100% on-chain in smart contracts, but you play with other people against the house at the same time. The next one that's coming out soon is social crafts. If you've ever been to Vegas, if you're playing on a craps table, you can go with all your buddies and sit around it and play together. The whole experience. Social gaming is probably one of the harder things to get right on-chain, but if you do get it right, like we did with social Blackjack, it's an insane experience. I made a tweet the other day about how, in my opinion, it's the coolest defi innovation. No, again, biased a little bit, but anyone out here that enjoys crypto or on-chain, I beg you to go look under the hood. I beg you what's going on over there. It's really cool. To answer your other point about the other projects and communities, Ape Church is one of the biggest collaborative projects in the space. We've been doing this since the very start. What we do is we let anyone that has a community or any IP of any kind build a game at Ape Church. What building a game does is it gets your IP and your R on the homepage and anytime anyone clicks or plays the game, especially if it's a hit. You're just reinforcing the IP over and over again. Also, it trustlessly, through the contract, cuts a percentage of every single bit placed over to the team's wallet. It's a revenue source for them. What we found is that people love supporting their favorite projects. They all have a similar RTP, like House Edge, so it doesn't really matter which one you play. I mean, it does. Some games have higher and less, of course, but you can just play to support your favorite project or your favorite IP. Of course, like I said before, the IP, just getting hammered into people's heads. We've had a lot of people that didn't know about balloons or whatever it might be coming in. Our last partner was we had the Meebid's guys and we had the chimpssters. We got some other sick ones coming up, like Quarkies. We got a lot of cool partners coming that we're excited to build with and have on there. Started with a lot of Ape chain projects, getting some Eath ones up there now that are Ape and Jason, so to speak. Anyhow, man, it's just fun. It's a lot of fun. It's my favorite team I've been a part of by far since my time in crypto seven years ago or so. I got a lot of things out there. I think I'm going to go to you in a second, Ella, but I think D5 Mark is like a mad genius. He's one of those quit types where all of a sudden they come back to you and they just did something crazy and you're like, holy shit, I didn't know that could exist. Ella, throw to you. I was going to say, what has been like since you've launched Ape Church, what has been the craziest day on the platform? In what capacity? In terms of traction or volume or for me personally, what do you mean? Just making sure. What surprised you the most about user behavior after launch? Probably the superstition. We have a few players that are very superstitious. One of them, I won name names. He believes that if you deposit one ape into the house, you wait 15 minutes. You withdraw one ape from the house that your luck will increase. You just see constantly, small deposits in the house. Recently, there's this thought that you can't let your account go over a certain wager volume. This guy just keeps wagering up to a couple thousand apes and then giving up another account and playing again. It's just something new every week. That was one of the funnier things because I'm like, no, it's 100% on chain. I was like, I can't control anything. It's a fully open VRF. It was using PIF for a while. Never using ape chains. I was like, yeah, I can't influence any random numbers. You can see exactly how they're consumed because the cool thing is it's not just the games don't just throw a random number back and then just pay you out. If you actually look at the contracts, the entire game logic is built on chain. When you're playing Blackjack, it's not like you're just throwing you, oh, you won, you lost. You're like drawing a card from a deck and evaluating it, evaluating the hands, et cetera. It's the entire game logic based entirely on on chain randomness. There's no Oracle. There's no server on our end that you have to trust. It is 100% on chain. I keep telling people that but they just don't believe. No, but it's some of these superstitious guys. They just don't believe me at all. That was one of the things I was a little surprised about but it's honestly kind of funny. I've come around on it. What was that moment where you and Coco and the team said, you know what? We should build an on chain casino on a chain. So I've always been a math nerd. That was kind of my start. I went to school for math and I pivoted to computer science kind of halfway through on the advice of some family of mine. I found out I was really, it kind of was very easy for me to learn and grasp the concepts because I was really good at math. So I didn't want my game theory minor to go to waste. So I ended up building some rough concepts that I would play with some friends. And then the idea was just kind of hit. It was like, I could make this, instead of just me throwing money into this pseudo house that we're playing against, I could make this a fully permissioned list system where anyone can throw money in or take money out and anyone could play against it in a way where I have zero control or ownership. And that was kind of the birth of it. Because yeah, like when I say it again, I'll reinforce it as many times as possible because you don't have to trust me. It's all on chain. We have zero control over pretty much any of it. There's no way to change the random numbers. There's no way to do anything. It's just, you know, you play a game, it sends a request to the VRF. VRF comes back to the random number, runs through the contract loop and you get what you get based on the game logic and what game you're playing. And we got like 40 something different games right now too, which is really all unique, all 100% custom built either by us or by partner IPs that are on there. Like I said, we got a bunch of IPs on there, some Abe-Chain classics, some ETH OGs and much more to come soon as well. But yeah, man, it's been a really fun experience all the way around. So I get to flex my math muscle a little bit, which is why I like to do it, at least. Yeah, no, Coco is definitely a, he likes to flex the D-Den muscle. So you sounds like you guys are like the perfect partnership. I love that this is on Abe-Chain, man. So one of my questions is, what does Abe-Chain allow you to do? That would be harder on ETH or any other ecosystem. The first thing about Abe-Chain is the how fast it is. So the Ethereum's walk time, like the time it takes for a full block to get mined is like anywhere from 12 to 15 seconds. Whereas Abe-Chain is 250 milliseconds, so a quarter of a second. And what that really does is a VRF response is usually one block. So when you click a button, it only takes a quarter of a second to get a response. And you do see a delay a little bit, but it's barely noticeable. Compared to all of it, if you did on ETH, you'd click, and you know, you'd go grab a beer and do a couple push-ups or something, and your game would be ready at the end of it. But on Abe-Chain, it's very snappy. You don't even notice it really. It's pretty instantaneous. Obviously, there's a little bit of delay, and especially if you use Manomask, you've got to click the damn approved button. But if you're using social wall, it's quite seamless. So outside of, of course, I'm an ape, Coco's an ape. We all love the community here and want to build on it. We've really fallen in love with Abe-Chain, and have been championing it for a year now, Coco longer. Aside from all those reasons, it is a great chain for it because it's a layer three. It's lightning quick, it's cheap. And yeah, it just has everything it needed out of the box. All right, since Honey Bee is that, what is the whole, like, white ape church? Where did the name and the whole church congregation identity come from? Amen, brother Honey Bee.