Well, it has certainly been an interesting week, there is never a dull moment in crypto eh?
The NeoSwap team was present at Breakpoint this year, our CXO, Hamza Diaz and our CSO, Kieran Parker-Moroney were on site all week soaking up the atmosphere and meeting people! There was a ton of buzz this year and it was noticeable how many builders/engineers were there compared to last year.
Almost everyone we bumped into was a founder or part of a team building something.
Some highlights: we kicked off with the Solana Foundation Games Day, which was excellent. Shout out to Matt Sorg for organising this.
There were over 30 games building on Solana presenting. It was a great mix of strategy games, card games, first-person shooters and battle royales. We had the chance to try and bunch and speak to the teams involved. There were some excellent games and it would be unfair to pick favourites. Some fun ones that stood out included BR1 with a really interesting model- The world's first ‘risk-based shooter’- you pay to spawn but if you kill people you take a small amount of money from them- so it costs you when you die. Playing with some skin in the game!
There was No Way Back, a really fun game with death matches, bunch of you on a map fighting each other…I spent a lot of time at their station playing… a LOT of time.
We also spoke with some cool games like Metaversium building a fun strategy game with an Age Of Empires style conquest angle, and I believe they are entirely on-chain which is really cool! They are also building an in-game economy, somewhere NeoSwap could help :).
Also met The Cavemen Club and shout out to Matthew from CaveWorld for wrestling Matty Graham of Sino Global. I hear a rematch is in order!
Overall the Games day was a great initiative, it was exciting to see all these games in one space together as you rarely do. They was a lot of enthusiasm in the room as it was just fun and people were engaged with a variety of games.
On-to the main conference, things were no different. NeoSwap met lots of really interesting protocols and people.
The energy was really great, talks were extremely well attended with many being almost standing-room only.
Instagram came and presented, telling everyone the exciting news of NFT support going forward.
BackPackWAO did a fascinating presentation on xNFTs and as you can see from the picture, this talk was PACKED! If you want to know wtf xNFTs are you can read more here.
On the Sunday there was a 5 aside football event put on by a few of the communities including DeGods, CaveWorld, BigBrainHoldings, StripDAO and more. It was a blast, and a nice change of pace. The side events were also really were excellent; go-karting competitions, brunches, in-depth talks with people who really cared, there was something for everyone.
I’d also like to mention Ultimate.Money and their launch party on the Thursday evening. Congratulations to the team and also to their Community Lead and Chief Sticker Officer Henry- as they made things so enjoyable. The product looks great and I look forward to toying around with it more, but perhaps most impressively Henry managed to get Toly in the Ultimate glasses (pics below).
I will treasure my merch 😂
Some other projects we found interesting, some you will have heard of already, but came with some cool updates:
- Dialect — wallet-to-wallet messaging
- Civic — Identity tools for web3, ID & age verification
- Star Atlas — Next gen gaming metaverse on Solana. This thing is hyped.
- Raindrops.xyz — They are standardising gaming on Solana. One way this was explained to me was breaking down NFTs into smaller components.
- MayhemLeague —
- Can add more
Closing thoughts
It hasn’t been an easy week for Solana to say the least, the FTX/Binance drama continues to unfold. However, builders will continue to build. There were lots of smart and interesting people exchanging ideas and looking to do challenging things.
We certainly left with more energy than we arrived with. People we showed NeoSwap too were palpably excited by what they saw.
