From Gamer to Web3 Disruptor: How Amos Whitewolf Is Rebuilding Gamer Trust with PerionXP

Desi (00:01.61) Hey Amos, welcome to Seekers. Tell us a bit about yourself and what you're building with Perion XP. If you had to explain it in just a couple of sentences to someone who's never heard of it, how would you describe it?

Amos (00:13.718) Yeah, so a little bit about me. I've always been entrepreneurial, always been a gamer. I started playing games from a very young age.

My parents gave me a Gameboy Color, I started playing Pokemon and a bunch of the old games on there. And then as I grew up a bit more, continued to be entrepreneurial, loving the Airbnbs, Ubers, the disruptive technology that I guess the internet was bringing to a lot of those industries that were previously not moveable. And then...

Found FPS's, got into that, got into League of Legends and kinda during my late high school years, started getting paid to boost people's accounts in League of Legends. Now, I guess what that is is someone that believes they should be a higher ranking than they are will kind of go to a a gray market website and they will pay money for someone like me when I was a bit younger to take that account to a higher level.

And it was a great little system because then that person would get boosted up, they would actually get back down to their skill level, and then often they would pay again. So it was a little bit of a kind of flexing on their friends sort of vibe there. It was about 17 to 18. It was great fun. was like, couldn't, as a gamer, you couldn't have a more fun job to do.

Desi (01:34.412) How old were you back then?

Amos (01:48.526) While you're doing your studies and that sort of stuff and to be honest my studies got destroyed because I was playing games making some money and Was not studying enough But that's another story And then got into crypto 2017 followed it up watch it crash back down like a bunch of people now that's Back then and kind of a lot of my life in there

crypto space that was like newbie and now it's like 2017 starting to be like, you've been here for ages sort of vibe, which is hilarious to see. yeah, I guess I I'm getting older. But yeah, so back to back to journey from there, I ended up finding a game called Axie Infinity that was in 2020 2021.

And I wanted to get my younger sisters feeling that same experience that I felt when I was playing League of Legends and boosting accounts. I also wanted to help them get some financial literacy in the blockchain space, which is a space that I was so passionate about. So I started learning about Axie Infinity, started playing myself to teach them. That ended up being a little bit selfish because I got addicted to the game.

and started setting myself goals. The first goal was to get to top thousand and then I got there and I was like, I want to get to top hundred. And then when I got to top hundred, I was like, I really want to get to number one. Like I really, really want that. And started playing 12 hours a day. was all I was thinking about and ended up getting to number one and holding that position on and off for about a month, which was an amazing experience and translated a lot into the

Desi (03:35.081) wow.

Amos (03:46.56) values and what we're trying to build at Perion XP. Yeah.

Desi (03:51.904) Awesome. That's a shift from being a gaming to becoming the number one ranked X infinity player to co-founding a Web3 gaming company. Do you remember what was the aha moment for you that made you transition from playing games to building something like Perion? At what point did you realize there was a real gap in the market for this and like convince you that Web3 was the right way to solve it?

Amos (04:18.988) Yeah, so I guess I'll break that down a little bit, but, and back to your previous question, so Perion XP is a, it's a AAA questing layer for gaming. And what that essentially means is it's a questing layer built on top of games and it helps with user acquisition. So it really helps games to cut through

the noise and bring users onto particularly Web2 three, but Web2 two as well and have those users actually participate in the game. So what we've, what we've done there is similar to, guess, how a Strava in the fitness sector gamifies, gamifies fitness. We've actually kind of like gamified gaming, which is funny to think about, but

how that actually works is we take that Web3 crypto layer and we gamify that on top of games that gamers are already playing, like Fortnite, and it's in a, I keep saying gamified, but it is a game itself and it's a little bit more custom than say a traditional questing layer where it's like you go do the thing, you get rewarded for doing the thing, the thing being

you go like a post and you get rewarded for liking a post. It's more like you participate in the game itself. You go get a bunch of kills and you choose what you like to do within a game. So in a questing layer, you get told to do one thing within PerionXP XP, you get to decide what kind of gamer you are and then do the things that you really like and you get rewarded equally for doing

those things.

Desi (06:17.171) Awesome. So how do you decide that? you have like different challenges and how do people had the flexibility to decide what they're going to be playing to be like, to become the best at?

Amos (06:29.644) Yeah, so we have about 60 different challenges specifically for Fortnite and you can replay them over and over and over. So if you really like getting kills in Fortnite, you can be like, I just want to get the kill challenges. So you pick the killer challenges, you load them up into your missions, you get ready to get your rewards and then you just go do that. And what's really interesting about that and specifically for, I guess, Epic and Fortnite, what's quite interesting about that?

Desi (06:35.253) Right.

Amos (06:59.712) is it actually changes how a gamer is playing their game as well. So for example, in Fortnite, it's a battle royale. So a battle royale, you get a hundred people, they all jump into different spots on the map, and it's last person standing. So the whole goal of the game is to get to the end and be number one. But if you have a kills challenge, you probably want to jump into the map where there's a lot of people, you want to get a bunch of kills, and then you want to get out so you can...

jump back in a new game and get a bunch more kills. So it's actually changing how a gamer is playing existing games.

Desi (07:34.453) right.

Okay awesome. And what was the hard moment for you? When did you realize that this idea had legs and you really wanted to develop it into something more than just a side hustle?

Amos (07:50.668) Yeah, so the origins of Perion, it was previously Perion, the origins of Perion, was very like, this is, as an entrepreneur, this is the simplest idea that I've ever had that could be profitable pretty much immediately. So that was the aha moment and it started off an Excel spreadsheet where,

Desi (08:10.219) All right.

Amos (08:18.592) I did a few little numbers and I was like, wow, pretty sure this could be seriously profitable within 10 days. And I took that to a bunch of people and my two co-founders were like, all right, let's do it. After a bunch of other people were like, let's not do it. And you're crazy, Amos. Like, why would you do this? And these two guys jumped in and it worked exactly as the Excel spreadsheet said it would.

Desi (08:39.051) Yeah.

Amos (08:47.214) And that kind of went into raising capital and that sort of thing. Now for the current version of Perion XP, the aha moment is we started in Web2 two. So we started in Web2 gaming and we kind of hid all of the blockchain side of things because we believed that those Web2 two people weren't ready for blockchain. And I'm sure this is very prominent across the entire spaces.

Desi (09:09.109) Right.

Amos (09:14.198) When is the right time to bring the Web2 people on? How much Web3 do you show in your product? And is that gonna scare people away? So that's what we started as and it started working really well. And then we started introducing features and pieces that were Web3. And there was one point where we actually did the transition and we did the full transition over.

And we were like, oh no, our discord is going to blow up. These people are going to hate us. And what happened is some people got it and some people didn't get it. So it was about 50/50 50 within our discord, but the people that got it, what was really, really interesting is they really got it and they started teaching the people that didn't get it and the people that were concerned that we were moving to this full Web2 three world, why we were doing that and

why they should get involved and that we're giving value to these people. So why wouldn't, what does it matter if it's a Web2 three or a Web2 two thing, how you're getting your payouts, how the economics work within the platform?

Desi (10:24.765) The people who initially got it, were they already in the Web3 space? Were they kind of crypto-native and they were kind of literally understood the space? Or they kind of discovered, that's not, that makes sense, I completely get it. I mean, I'm just gonna help more and more people get it with me and start playing.

Amos (10:48.096) Yeah, so...

The number one person that became the biggest supporter was fully against it for weeks before they converted over. So for about two weeks, we said we were moving to a Web2 three space and to be prepared and stuff. And they were like, you guys are sellouts. You're doing this. You're doing that. And then I was like in the discord messaging, I was like, just wait, just please wait, try it. I can't say anything more, but I really hope you're going to like it.

Desi (11:08.074) Right.

Amos (11:19.216) and then over our first playtest weekend they fully got it and then within I think it was three days they became a huge supporter teaching other people that had been through their same journey of I don't want this don't don't put web3 in my gaming that sort of stuff and then completely flipped

Desi (11:42.397) Interesting. Did you use any other community building strategies that help you on board more and more people other than your core community already helping you with word of mouth?

Amos (11:54.926) So there was the core community, which was a core Web2 community. A lot of those people came through word of mouth and paid advertisements, particularly meta paid advertisements. And that really helped build a solid Web2 community. Then when we transitioned across to full Web3, we continued with those...

Desi (12:04.192) Mm-hmm.

Amos (12:17.558) paid advertisements, but we also got more streamers from both Web2 two and Web2 three, which was really, really valuable. We reached out to some proper Web2 three gaming guilds as well, which was just to validate that like, this is still a Web2 three game, even though it's simple and works and feels like something that belongs in Web2 two.

Desi (12:45.163) And at the moment, do you see your role more as onboarding gamers into Web3 or more like getting the Web3 community excited about gaming and discovering new users? Because we all know the ecosystem is still not that big and the real opportunity lies in bringing people from Web2

to Web3. Like, and the other thing is the flip side of that is that many people, especially in the gaming industry, for some reason, they hate this sort of monetization crypto element to be part of their game. So what do we do now? So do we convince them or we just leave these guys aside and we just go back to, we go to the Web3 crowd and we just try to make them more excited about playing Fortnite or other.

A games.

Amos (13:38.69) Yeah, that's a great question. This is, it's a billion dollar question. And right now there's so much information on Twitter about...

Desi (13:41.612) million dollar question here, right? If we knew the answer.

Amos (13:51.938) you see these things, it's Web2 three gaming is dead and then there's influences being like, no, it's not dead, it's this. But to answer your question, I want to see a world where it is just gaming. It blows my mind that we have the Web2 two and the Web2 three gaming. And I think the reason that's so strong is because you can't use block blockchain isn't necessarily just used as a technology often. It's like,

people get maybe a little bit too attached to the technology. And if you think about say like what database your Gmail is using or any of these sort of things, no one cares. You just care that the product is really, really good. So.

To answer your question, we want to bring actual gamers into the space and we want to get them to actually participate and actually spend. And that is going to be difficult, but to do that, we need to actually bring them value that is enhancing their gameplay as opposed to taking away from it. And that's going to be a really difficult challenge.

Desi (15:05.003) Because many of them, they just hate the Play to Earn model. They think it's just destroying the industry and the ecosystem.

Amos (15:15.5) Yeah, 100%.

A lot of that is because when you have a Web2 3 gamer telling you this is the most amazing game in the world and then the Web2 2 gamer goes and has a look and it's not. It's some pixelated thing with kind of, I don't know, from things that are fully on chain and they're waiting for transactions. There's no kind of beauty in it or anything like that. And they're like, why is this person telling me this is such an amazing game?

trash. It's trash to what they're comparing it to and I don't think it's just in it needs to be this amazing visual experience like chess is a very very simple game and it's a timeless game there's no amazing graphics and it has a huge huge player base that's constantly playing on like chess.com and stuff so what it needs to be is it needs to everyone says this it needs to be fun

It needs to really capture a person's attention, needs to be fun, and I think...

A lot of the play to earn stuff has been economy first until economy collapses, which is also a very scary place for a Web2 2 person when it needs to really be like that fun or that value first. And there's a lot of places where you can give value to gamers. Community is a huge one.

Amos (16:48.012) Lots of gamers don't have necessarily friends to play with or would love to kind of be put into communities where they can have a lot of fun. You have competition. If you can increase a gamer's competitive spirit.

the amount of time they're going to spend in the game is going to increase, which is also going to increase the amount of items, the amount of skins they're going to purchase in game. And then lastly, you sort of have, we call it clout, but it's where you want to showcase that you have achieved really, really cool things within the game. So our focus is on enhancing those three value pieces to make someone's gaming way, way

way better and eventually get to a point where we can have positive, positive tokenomics like within our platform that's based on that.

Desi (17:47.07) Awesome. And as you're saying, it doesn't really matter what's the backend technology. Is it Web2? Is it Web3? It's all about the experience you're offering to gamers. Who do you blame for the reputation of Web3 gaming? the moment, unfortunately, the moment somebody hears that there is a Web3 blockchain element to a certain game, you still have this reputation. This might be a fad. This is like this...

Amos (18:00.238) You

Desi (18:15.979) This speculative reputation is something we have to continue fighting against. What do you think caused that? Was it the NFT wave or like maybe particular games that burned many people?

Amos (18:30.092) Yeah, I actually think it was the Web2 organizations. So this is what happens, the NFT craze went off, Web3 gaming was going off, and then you have these Web2 organizations being like, we can sell skins for 10 times the amount we can normally sell skins for, and it's gonna cost us the same to create them.

And then you have all these Web2 organizations trying to get off the back of this craze. And you see this in crypto a lot, right? You see this when celebrities are getting in on meme coins and everything goes up and then everything crashes. It was the exact same thing in...

in gaming when all of these Web2 two companies were like, we can make a quick dollar off these stupid people. And that burned all of these Web2 two gamers. And for anyone that doesn't know about gamers, it's a hive mind. It is this gamer hive mind. And part of the reason it's a hive mind is because these people are

communicating with each other so much more frequently than you would even believe. Like if you spend three hours in Fortnite gaming, you are talking to people constantly. You're talking in Discord, you're talking in Fortnite. Every single one of these large multiplayer games, you're constantly chatting. So you have this amazing flow of information and it builds this sort of hive mind. So when all of these gamers sort of got ripped off,

And they're smart, like they're really smart. They're like playing games from a very, very young age. They are on the internet from a very, very young age and they can work out that these Web2 organizations, Ubisoft was one of them, trying to make a quick buck out of them and not give them any value.

Amos (20:24.652) That's it. So that's who I blame. And I wish they hadn't done that. And I wish they had had a little bit more time to think about what value they could offer. Because it didn't actually need to be Web2 three, what they were doing. And we've seen it. Riot Games loves doing this, but Riot Games sells $500 skins. They're not Web2 three skins. They give you extra value and stuff like that. But.

Desi (20:43.221) right.

Amos (20:49.984) It's a normal thing in the gaming space to have things that, or digital assets that are quite expensive.

Desi (20:57.867) And in your case, Perion XP rewards players with crypto for completing challenges in simple terms. That's what you do. If players aren't paying as it is in Web2, where is the money coming from? How do you make the economics work so it is sustainable for you?

Amos (21:17.102) So the short-term vision there is we're going to need to get that to be sustainable by having partnerships with people that are getting things out of what we are doing. Those people and organizations are usually your games, your game developers and

different people in the web3 ecosystem like wallets, maybe exchanges, different chains that are looking for bringing people that are web2 people into their ecosystem. So that's short term is we need partnerships to be able to do that and sustain that longer term.

Longer term is exactly what I was talking about before, where we actually are able to give enough value to these gamers to enhance their gaming to have them spending even more.

Desi (22:11.659) and you have your own native token, right? Okay, and tell me a little bit more about it. What kind of benefits I get from the ecosystem earning this token?

Amos (22:14.722) Yes.

Amos (22:26.498) Yeah, so you're able to participate in the DAO. So you can vote with the token. You're able to buy gems directly with that. So the only way you can buy gems, which is a...

Web to currency I guess within the game is through spending per token and Then what that enables you to do with those gems is enhance your experience within the perion XP ecosystem it's based on things that work in Web2 to which is Things that save you time things that get you additional

items, that get you additional rewards, things that enhance your gaming experience, again, is what those microtransactions or microtransaction gems are for.

Desi (23:15.381) Amazing, how many gamers do you now have on your platform?

Amos (23:19.412) So we've had, there's about 150,000 gamers that are total registered and about 100,000 of those have connected their Epic accounts. So they're what we consider verified gamers and are actually moving further down the funnel and participating in the platform.

Desi (23:36.861) Okay and that's all coming from organic and meta arts. Any other strategies you guys are using that you would like to share with us? There must be something right? Creating this hype so many people getting excited. Where are these people coming from?

Amos (23:46.145) You

Amos (23:52.974) So I think the other one is guilds, other one is influences actually kind of coming in with what's really really cool is we've actually had organic influences coming in and bringing their communities with them.

Desi (24:08.959) Bye.

Amos (24:09.502) and wanting to kind of show off how cool their community is. Because another thing here is when we're talking about people within Web3 specifically, there is not a lot of games. There's not a lot. And playing these games often can get very boring. what we offer is go play.

a fully AAA game like Fortnite, go have fun, go do Para and XP within, sorry, in between your play time so you can just screen switch across to Para and XP, set up your missions, jump back into Fortnite and kind of like switch between the two as you're checking. So it's just, I think, a breath of fresh air for a lot of these people.

Set.

I know aren't maybe having the most fun in the Web2 3 gaming space can play a Web2 2 game and still be interacting with Web2 3 so that's been really good and Back to the value piece. So I got so excited. I was driving along with my mom the other day and It came up on my we just launched our stats feature and stats feature is a kind of beautiful Customizable piece on the site where you can see your fortnight stats

that.

Amos (25:35.37) It's not a Web2 three thing. It's just a piece of value where you can add your profile picture, customize the background and see your stats for the season. And I started seeing people posting on Twitter, this stats feature that we'd just launched. And like that's that sort of organic piece of, Hey, we're giving value to these people. They're actually seeing that it's cool. And then they're going and sharing it because it's giving them content and it's giving them value to be sharing to their community.

Desi (26:06.087) Amazing. Who else is the mastermind behind the whole mechanics? it just you? Tell me a little bit more about your team. you have like really talented developers perhaps, growth people? Who are the people building it at the moment?

Amos (26:23.34) Yeah, so I think there's a high level of the whole vision and stuff and I think that's really shared between myself and my founders. But then on the, on who's really kind of brought this cutthroat chaos piece to life, which is the first.

the first metagame within Perion XP is the developers. have, because they're gamers as well, they have been like, wow, we get to create something that we would want to use ourselves. So they've got to work with the designers to create something that is really, really special and that we all, like I was playing this before I got on the podcast today with our CEO, Jan, because we just all love it. Like we're playing it.

we all love it and yeah the mastermind is the dev team and I think designers but it's like a whole team effort. Marketing is chatting with product and then we're getting in cool ways to get out there organically and that sort of thing because as you know I'm sure the best product sort of markets itself right.

Desi (27:38.731) Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and it's so exciting to see how much deep you are into that and how much you love it. How much of your time do you now spend playing? Do you still play games? Do you have time to play?

Amos (27:51.895) Yeah

I wish I had more time. And it's funny because I love games so much that I have to sort of limit my behavior there. So every time we have a new play test or new product or anything like that...

Desi (28:12.181) That's the excuse for you to play. We need more games, need more features, so I have to taste them out.

Amos (28:18.19) That's it Desi, that is exactly it. I'm just testing, I'm bug testing.

Desi (28:28.125) Alright, okay. If you could fast forward 10 years, what do you think is going to be the biggest difference between how we game today and how people will be gaming in the future? What do you see changing?

Amos (28:41.826) I love this question. So I feel like sometimes you have to go back in time to go into the future. This is like all the time. And there's a term that we used to have in Australia and that was play for keeps. So play for keeps, you would essentially have your marbles or your Tazos or your Beyblades or whatever game you're playing. And when you wanted to up the stakes, you would say,

play for keeps. And that means if you win, you win the other person's marble, you win the other person's Tazo or whatever game you're playing. So it ups the stakes. And we used to do this when we were five years old. It was awesome. And sometimes there were tears involved, but it was a lot of fun. And when you say this term to the generation that are in school now and playing games, they have never heard of it. And the reason they've never heard of it,

Desi (29:38.037) Right.

Amos (29:39.606) is because they've never owned any of the assets that they have. So they're buying assets, but they can't do this game that we used to love playing, which was Play for Keeps. So I think in 10 years time, we're gonna come full circle back to that where people can do that. And it doesn't need to be like a gamble. It can be kind of kids just having fun, playing with their friends, putting up.

Skin for a skin see who gets a headshot first and all that sort of stuff

Desi (30:11.731) bring it back to its very nature, right? Bring it back to the thrill of playing rather than buying and kind of turning into this almost like commercial experience. And if you could change one thing in gaming now, regardless of whether it's related to Web2 or Web3, what would it be? And you're not allowed to say everybody's gonna be brought to Web3.

Amos (30:38.849) change one thing in gaming.

is a hard question.

Desi (30:45.277) There must be something that you see in the community that really annoys you and you wish it was different, maybe the way people look at things.

Amos (30:52.44) Yeah.

I would love for gaming to be more open. So one big problem with gaming, it's not a problem, it's just really hard to be a part of is a lot of gaming is really locked up. So if you want to get into creating an eSports team, it's really hard, it's really locked up. You have...

Publishers that own all the rights to everything you're not allowed to stream unless you have permission to do so all of the IP is owned by

the fair parties that own that IP and it is fair, but I just wish it was a little bit more open so that you could have more people like myself and like a lot of these people building in the gaming space in general, able to give value to gamers in more creative ways. And a great example of that is like when banking data was opened up.

all of these different parties were able to create really cool experiences for people because that data was open. And I don't mean kind of publicly pushing out people's privacy or anything like that, but...

Amos (32:10.558) even if that data was more public, you would have e-sports teams able to recruit people from younger ages and you would have even more competition in these spaces. And you see that in regular sports, like in regular sports, you have the schools that are doing the running races, they all go up to district and then state level and then can compete at higher and higher levels. And you just don't have this in gaming because it is locked up by

the publishers and that's really it. So I wish it was more open.

Desi (32:45.899) And what's your long-term vision for Perion XP? Are you the quest to make gaming more open?

Amos (32:54.158) I'm really kind of, I would love it to.

I really love anime and I really love sort of video gaming and in anime there's a lot of explorations of what the world looks like in a more kind of gamified world where you can be further immersed within gaming and I think in Western culture it's explored less but where it is explored is Ready Player One. So really I would like to, I would like Para and Explore

to be a part of getting to a place where Ready Player One sort of exists in real life. And what that means to me is where you have all of these different IPs that can be intertwined and you have a financial rail on top of that where someone's identity within a game can be as valuable or more valuable than their physical

identity.

Desi (34:02.355) Amazing. Thank you so much for your time Amos. Where can people find you online if they want to connect with you?

Amos (34:23.142) So you can find me, it's at mosnifty on x.com and to follow Perion XP and what we're doing there it's at perion-dow.