In play to earn (P2E) games, players would often make real-world (not just virtual) money based on their time and effort playing games. This trend is related to the broader shifts that have been transforming gaming and beyond from the rise of the creator economy to the changing relationship between people and platforms. Web3 allows us to counter the current norm where all the proceeds of playing and transacting in games go only to gaming companies. Users spend so much time in, and generate so much value for, those platforms that they deserve to be compensated, too.

But games were not necessarily designed to be a workplace (at least, not for the majority of players). What we really need are games that are both fun to play and that also allow players to capture more of the value they produce. As such, P2E is increasingly morphing into play-and earn, setting an important distinction between gaming and workplace. The dynamics of how resulting gaming economies are managed will continue to shift as we see P2E evolve beyond its initial growing pains. Ultimately, however, this will not be a separate trend and will just become part of games.

Arianna Simpson, General Partner (AriannaSimpson) When AI becomes the gamemaker, crypto offers guarantees As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about web3 games and the future of gaming, its clear to me that AI agents in games must come with guarantees: that theyre based on certain models, and that those models are executed without corruption. Otherwise, games will lose integrity. When lore, terrain, narrative, and logic are all procedurally generated in other words, when AI becomes the game maker were going to want to know that the game maker was credibly neutral. Were going to want to know that that world was built with guarantees. The most important thing that crypto offers is such guarantees including the ability to understand, diagnose, and penalize when something goes wrong with AI. In this sense, AI alignment is really an incentive design problem, in the same way dealing with any human agent is an incentive design problem and is what crypto is all about.

Carra Wu, investing partner (carra on Farcaster, carrawu on Twitter) Formal verication becomes less, well, formal While formal methods are popular for verifying hardware systems, they are less common in software development. For most developers outside of such hard or safety-critical systems, these methods are too complex, and could add signicant costs and delays. However, smart contract developers have different demands: The systems they develop handle billions of dollars; bugs would have devastating consequences, and cannot typically be hotxed. So theres a need for more accessible formal verication methods in software and especially smart contract development.