Interview | Yini, PANews

Author | Zen, PANews

Rebecca Liao has a unique and rich background in the entire Web3 industry. Her career began at the top law firm Skadden, where she worked as an international corporate lawyer. Later, she joined the AI-based international procurement service company Globality, serving as the Director of Business Development and Asia Head in this unicorn enterprise. She has also been involved in politics, serving as a member of a presidential campaign responsible for Asian trade and economic policy. Before founding Saga, she had already ventured into the blockchain field, co-founding Skuchain with Cosmos co-founder Zaki Manian. The company aims to provide new supply chain solutions based on blockchain technology, with the platform's annual transaction volume growing to over $5 billion in 2020.

Regardless of her changing roles, the focus of Rebecca's career has always been on economic development, especially in helping developing countries innovate infrastructure to bring more opportunities to people. Since she started exploring cryptocurrencies in 2014, she quickly realized that this financial innovation could be the answer to democratizing financial services. After a brief involvement in political activities, she ultimately decided to stay in the crypto field.

Recently, PANews conducted an exclusive interview with Rebecca on Saga's technology, business, future development, and its impact on Web3 games. The following is a summary based on the interview content.

L1 Designed Specifically for Developers

Saga is an end-to-end infrastructure designed for Web3 development. As a Layer 1 protocol specifically tailored for developers, Saga aims to allow developers to automatically launch parallel and interoperable dedicated L1 chains called Chainlets. These chains can be elastically scaled according to the needs of their Web3 applications, achieving unlimited horizontal scalability to address blockchain network congestion. For Web3 applications aiming for large-scale adoption and to embrace consumer trends, an outstanding performing chain is an essential prerequisite.

Rebecca stated that Saga's product design focuses on scalability, especially for applications in the gaming and entertainment industries with high performance requirements. As a key aspect of scalability, the chains within Saga have high interoperability, allowing users within the Saga ecosystem to seamlessly interact across different Chainlets without feeling the presence of multiple chains. For users looking to cross the Saga ecosystem, it provides fast bridging services. All chains in Saga have fast transaction finality, achieved through a fully decentralized set of validators.

In addition, Saga divides its token economics into two parts: front-end and back-end, corresponding to end users and the flow of tokens between Chainlet developers, developers, and Saga chains. It adopts a mechanism similar to cloud service providers, where end users of applications do not need to pay gas fees and only interact with Chainlets, while the configuration costs of Chainlets are paid by developers using Saga tokens, costing approximately $500 per chain per month. This model provides developers with advantages in usability and value accumulation, allowing them to flexibly choose a monetization model based on their preferences and needs.

Simplified Creation of Dedicated Chains and Complex Progressive Mainnet Launch

Many in the industry believe that modular blockchain is the way forward, and Saga, as a player in the modular field, has already positioned itself on the competitive path to the future. Among its competitors, Saga stands out with its advantages and features such as interoperability, unlimited scalability, automation, security, and market promotion.

Saga aims to make the deployment of smart contracts and the configuration of Chainlets a fully automated process. Saga Chainlets have a dedicated virtual machine deployed on a single chain, and when developers need to deploy, they only need to request Chainlet activation from the Saga mainnet. Once the request is received, Saga validators will provide the requested Chainlet. From the developer's perspective, the "one-click chain launch" web application introduced by Saga makes it simpler to launch a dedicated blockchain or Chainlet, requiring only input of a few parameters and clicking "Launch Chainlet" to have a fully decentralized chain. Additionally, Saga uses shared security to eliminate the complexity of protecting the ecological security, employing an Optimistic Coordination model similar to Cosmos Hub version 1 for inter-chain staking, ensuring the security of each Saga Chainlet through shared security from the Saga mainnet.

In the market, active promotion is undoubtedly an important part of Saga's rapid expansion and success. This is due to Saga not only having a leading technical team in engineering but also a sizable business team. Rebecca believes that business development is at the core of Saga, with 350 projects currently building the Saga ecosystem, the majority of which have been confirmed to join before the official launch of the Saga mainnet. With a focus on the gaming and entertainment sectors, 80% of the projects in the Saga ecosystem are gaming projects, while NFT or entertainment projects account for 10%, and the remaining 10% are DeFi. As the Saga mainnet goes live, being a universal Layer 1 may also attract more DeFi projects.

Last week, Saga officially launched its mainnet and announced the entry into the first phase. This phase will initiate the secure chain of Saga to lay the foundation for platform operations, providing secure infrastructure for activities such as staking, mining, and airdrops, and creating a secure environment for developers and users to participate in the platform. Saga innovatively adopts a progressive multi-stage mainnet launch strategy. In the subsequent second to sixth stages, it will gradually introduce platform chains, shared security, external validators, and penalty mechanisms. When asked about the construction of the Saga mainnet, Rebecca candidly admitted that building an infinitely scalable system is very challenging, and the progressive approach means that each major component can be tested step by step and issues can be addressed individually, allowing all stakeholders to participate and complete the full release of the Saga protocol as smoothly as possible.

"Service-Oriented" Infrastructure

After SAGA was listed on Binance Launchpool, it broke the historical records for total lock-up value and the number of participants in the event, and the price maintained a good momentum after opening, but later declined along with the market fluctuations. Regarding the story of communicating with Binance for the launchpad listing, Rebecca did not reveal too many details. She described Binance as an excellent partner and stated that the exchange may have realized early on that Saga is a very reliable team with a great mission and fully capable of executing it.

"For us, the focus has always been on the product. It has always been on developers and end users, how we can make their lives better. Saga is a brand that truly advocates freedom, unleashing imagination, and exploring creative expression together." Rebecca was confident from the start that her technical team could achieve milestone after milestone, and the collaboration with innovators from outside such as Celestia, Polygon, Avalanche, and other technical partners gave her confidence. The extensive support from the community also made her more certain about Saga's future development. "In the past few days, our community has shown their belief and support for us, which is really inspiring, and we are very grateful."

During the interview, Rebecca shared the business secret of how Saga successfully attracted numerous ecosystem projects. In addition to leading and participating in frontline business development, the most important aspect is Saga's service attitude and awareness towards developers. She believes that many platforms in Web3.0 have not truly realized their responsibility as platforms and have shifted the burden and pressure onto project teams. Based on this, Saga focuses more on serving projects, and the community it nurtures as infrastructure is actually for "nurturing" projects, which are the categories that can truly attract users in the long run.

Can Web3 Games Truly Go Mainstream?

Last month, Saga, with 80% of its ecosystem dedicated to gaming projects, launched Saga Origins, becoming the first and only Layer 1 Web3 game publisher. This indicates Saga's strong belief in the development of this field and its significant investment. The debate over whether Web3 games can truly achieve large-scale adoption has been ongoing for a long time, with many in the industry feeling disheartened after failing to achieve it, and traditional gamers often expressing disdain for Web3 games as financial fraud. On this issue, Rebecca shared her views and thoughts.

She believes that many people who lean towards tradition and conservatism may never like new things, and that's human nature. If the current system works well for them, it's hard to understand how things can be done in a new way, and there's no blame or fault in that. However, Web3 games can find experience and comfort in the development history of different categories of games:

• Free games: When free games first emerged, players who were used to the buy-to-play model hated it and felt that such games were very impure. Even though the quality of early free games was poor, unlike today's completely different quality, they have survived and developed into the thriving industry it is today. Almost no one remembers the time when free games were unpopular.
• Mobile games: There are still many hardcore gamers who strongly dislike mobile games because they often have a highly addictive infinite gaming mechanism. For many pure gamers, this is almost an offense to them. This offense has existed since the creation of mobile games and still persists. However, mobile games are the most profitable category of all games, and all gaming companies are aware of this.

Therefore, developers of Web3 games should take comfort in the fact that they can never satisfy every player, and it's completely acceptable for some people who don't like your game and won't be part of your community. "I think one lesson to learn is that your game doesn't have to be perfect. It's not that if my game isn't like Call of Duty, I'll never release it. You shouldn't have that fear. But I think having a very fun game with a very smooth user experience is always fundamental. So if you have that, I think some more Web3 elements are actually very positive."

"Actually, our target audience is the millennial generation, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and even younger people, as well as women and minorities," Rebecca said. Finally, she mentioned the success of "Roblox" and "Fortnite" based on user-generated content (UGC), which is based on the real active participation of users. This mechanism and effect are still relatively new in Web3 games, but once the box of decentralized user-generated content is opened, there will be tremendous value growth. Rebecca believes this is the way to go mainstream. "So for Web3 games, when people don't like your game, there's no need to be too sensitive. But there are some lessons to be learned about what makes a good Web3 game, and what kind of game truly leverages the advantages of Web3 elements that all practitioners should seriously consider."

Ecological Game Projects in Saga Will Explode in August

Next, Saga will continue to focus on Saga Origins. Rebecca stated that Origins will not sign many games, but will try to select games they truly believe in and support them with significant resources. She revealed that these games may start to be released in June and July, with a large-scale game release scheduled for the gaming week at the end of August. Additionally, Rebecca recommended several high-quality games to PANews:

Rogue Nation: A free cross-platform rogue-lite action role-playing game (ARPG) developed by Moonlit Games. Players can create and collect unique characters, pets, weapons, etc., to deal with challenging dungeons, raids, and compete with other players. The game emphasizes multiplayer and competitive gameplay while ensuring a delicate balance between risk and reward, constantly adjusting player strategies. By combining elements of casual and hardcore games, "Rogue Nation" provides an easy-to-learn rogue-lite experience and enriches classic ARPG systems, offering players a wide range of choices and depth. Additionally, players have full control over their digital assets, allowing them to trade, sell, or use their items inside and outside the game environment.

Another World: An open world similar to "Ready Player One," with multiple NFT community areas and PVP game areas. Players will choose an NFT number to start their journey, with four NFT communities: apecoin swamp, azuki-styled garden, clonex pods, and OCM jungle. In the middle of this open world, there is a PVP game area accessible from all community areas. The game is not affiliated with Yuga Labs, Azuki, RTFKT, or OnChainMonkey NFT series. The game development team consists of holders of NFT series such as Yuga Labs, Azuki, RTFKT, and OnChainMonkey. Players can participate in the game without owning NFTs.

Star Heroes: A third-person space shooting game that combines skill-based gameplay from both the web2 and web3 worlds, offering players exciting fast-paced spaceship battles, the allure of NFT collectibles, and captivating galactic adventures. It uses the "Free-to-Own" innovative mechanism, allowing players to forge in-game NFTs for free, giving them absolute ownership of these digital assets. Game modes include team deathmatch, strategic competition StarPush, and personalized custom modes.

Angelic: A narrative strategy role-playing game set in a cooperative dark sci-fi universe. It combines team role-playing games like "MASS EFFECT" and strategy games like "X-Com." Each hero in "Angelic" is unique, with different personal biographies and personalities. They also have unique combat abilities, and "Angelic" uses a novel turn-based combat mechanism, allowing players to fully control their heroes and experience their spectacular essence in battle.

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