The WLD Show
Charles Du: VBA. Building a Web3 Fantasy Fantasy Basketball Game | Will, Lee, & Andrew Learn Web3 #61
Episode Summary
Charles Du is the CEO and cofounder of Fast Break Labs. Fast Break Labs is building VBA, a Web3 game that allows basketball fans to strategize as general managers of their own virtual basketball teams. They just raised $6M with Patron and Pantera Capital leading the round. Angel investors include Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai’s Family Office, Sacramento Kings co-owner Aneel Ranadive, and Marc Merrill the Co-Founder of Riot Games. In this episode, we discuss the inspiration of VBA Game, how the game works, and future plans and considerations.
Episode Notes
Charles Du is the CEO and cofounder of Fast Break Labs. Fast Break Labs is building VBA, a Web3 game that allows basketball fans to strategize as general managers of their own virtual basketball teams. They just raised $6M with Patron and Pantera Capital leading the round.
Angel investors include Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai’s Family Office, Sacramento Kings co-owner Aneel Ranadive, and Marc Merrill the Co-Founder of Riot Games. In this episode, we discuss the inspiration of VBA Game, how the game works, and future plans and considerations.
Charles and VBA links:
Episode notes and links:
- Charles’ first exposure to basketball
- Charles’ playing basketball
- How Charles’ got excited about building VBA game
- Zed run: https://zed.run
- https://vbagame.medium.com
- How VBA Game’s goal is for managers to spend a lot of time talking to their friends, creating back stories, etc...
- VBA vs. Fantasy basketball’s core loops
- How VBA is “Fantasy, fantasy basketball”
- VBA game’s core loop
- The initial VBA team
- 7 initial players + potentially buying players from MagicEden
- VBA Player attributes and play styles
- How VBA simulations will run
- What’s given to GM’s at the end of games for more analysis
- Is VBA game thinking about GM’s hiring coaches or acting as coaches?
- How Charles thinks about player progression / regression work?
- NBA2k (https://nba.2k.com/) + MyGM fantasy sports
- How many players can someone hold?
- What was difficult to build?
- How the fundamental simulator work?
- What was on chain vs. off chain (player attributes)
- Evolving simulations + strategies
- How Charles thinks about reporters on the game
- Blaze ball
- How one Crypto Coven line, generate via GPT3, drove Charles to buy his CryptoCoven
- How did Charles refine the core loops and key problems to solve with VBA game?
- How Charles learned to code
- What unique Web3 role Charles is looking to hire for - COMMUNITY MANAGER!
- Have you met Joe Tsai?
- How Charles’ experience on the Facebook integrity team helped him think about and address potential risks to the game
- “Adversarial thinking”
- Where to mint a pack?
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