187 | From Crypto Unicorns to Neo Olympus

Jon Jordan talks to Laguna Labs' CEO Aron Beierschmitt about leaving behind debut game Crypto Unicorns and moving to new project Neo Olympus, which is a fully onchain game using the MUD engine and running on the B3 blockchain, with assets on Ethereum and Base. [2:45] What happened to Crypto Unicorns? [4:02] 2024 was a rough year. We went from +90 people to 10. But the DAO still exists. [5:27] "I accept all the blame for the failure. But I'm optimist about the path forward." [9:08] What was the spark of inspiration for Neo Olympus? [11:10] Why Aron is bullish on fully onchain games. [12:05] "Crypto Unicorns would still be around today if it was fully onchain." [13:15] Why did you choose B3 as the blockchain for Neo Olympus? [14:12] Neo Olympus will be cross-platform: playable from Arbitrum, from Abstract, from Ronin. [15:20] Most of the Neo Olympus' NFTs will be minted on Base. [18:57] The DN404 standard is "memecoins meets NFTs". [25:49] There's no investor or team allocation for the Olympus token. [28:39] "Time-based token vesting is silly." [31:15] What did your investors think about this approach? [34:20] How do you hope to scale Neo Olympus as fully onchain games can be complex? [35:27] Neo Olympus' gameplay is map-based tactics - Fire Emblem with titans. [37:22] We're building the game on Lattice's MUD engine.