Xai is a decentralized gaming ecosystem focused on developing and publishing blockchain games and supporting their underlying infrastructure. The ecosystem has no central team or authority. Projects are initiated by several key entities, each with a different role. As the project develops, additional entities are expected to support the project in various ways. The following is a brief overview of the initial stages of the project, summarizing the main groups and individuals involved.
1. Xai Foundation — Cayman Foundation
The Xai Foundation is the entity that serves as the custodian of the blockchain infrastructure that is the foundation for games that game developers deploy onto the chain. In addition, the foundation is also responsible for issuing and managing the native token of the Xai network, called "XAI".
The responsibilities of the Xai Foundation include:
Blockchain Strategy: The Xai Foundation develops a strategy for a blockchain network that supports blockchain games developed by Ex Populus. This ensures network stability and security, allowing for a seamless gaming experience.
Token Issuance and Management: The Xai Foundation is responsible for the creation and distribution of XAI tokens, the native currency of the blockchain ecosystem. The foundation also oversees the governance of the tokens and ensures a fair and transparent distribution process.
Community Development and Governance: The Xai Foundation is focused on cultivating a supportive and inclusive community around blockchain gaming. It will allow the Xai community to participate in the governance of the network in stages, ensuring that important decisions are made collectively.
The directors of the Xai Foundation remain anonymous for security reasons.
2. From the people
Ex Populus is a US-based laboratory entity responsible for research, development and innovation in blockchain games. It was Ex Populus' game development that inspired the founding of Xai. Ex Populus is the primary laboratory entity serving the ecosystem under the direction of the Foundation.
Ex Populus responsibilities include:
Research and Development: Ex Populus conducts extensive research on blockchain technology to explore its potential applications in the gaming industry. Staff are dedicated to creating innovative gaming experiences that leverage the transparency, security, and decentralized nature of blockchain networks.
Game Development: Ex Populus designs and develops exciting blockchain-based games that provide players with unique opportunities to own, trade and monetize game assets.
Marketing and Community Engagement: Ex Populus actively promotes its blockchain games and engages with the gaming community to promote growth and adoption.
Key team members at Ex Populus include:
Tobias Batton — CEO of Ex Populus
Tobias Batton is a 20-year digital product and marketing executive who has founded 3 companies and successfully exited 2. Prior to joining Ex Populus, Barton powered nearly 1 billion app installs for top mobile game publishers with its Signal Zero publishing and loyalty platform. In 2012, he was hired by Emerge Digital Group to build a mobile division, which helped Emerge become one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States (No. 8 on the Inc. 500). Prior to this, Barton was invited to build a real-time event tracking system and time search engine Live Matrix, which was later adopted by Facebook and became the basis of Facebook Live.
Barton is also one of the founding leaders of IGN's Indie Open House, which helps independent game developers create and publish their games for desktop and consoles. Barton also founded Resistor, which publishes a number of popular online and mobile games, including the wildly popular Clan Wars and the cultural phenomenon iGirl. Patton's first company was founded in 2006 to help independent filmmakers digitally distribute their films, and was acquired in 2008.
He was responsible for millions of dollars in R&D funding and built a digital advertising loss prevention platform while managing a multi-million dollar marketing budget every quarter. As a result, he drove nearly 1 billion installs to top mobile game publishers while preventing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for ad tech companies representing billions in annual market share. He led the development of mobile SSP, built a mobile promotion platform with more than 60 million users, and participated in the launch of thousands of games and applications. Because of his work in gaming promotion, he has been featured on Fox Business Risk and Reward. He has also lectured on these topics to doctoral candidates at Stanford University, MIT, and INSEAD. He has in-depth knowledge of mobile devices, information theory, Shannon entropy, device fingerprinting, and other related concepts.
Patton has designed and published several best-selling mobile and social games. This led him to publish the game design framework "Variable Dopamine-Wavelength Mapping Theory" - a system based on dopamine spikes in the brain that directly applies to the overlap of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Pavlov's Trigger Framework - —This theory has been presented at numerous conferences and articles, including in Forbes. He has been featured in Forbes, Fox Business Network, The New York Times, Wired, IGN, Cnet, and VentureBeat.
Soby — Head of Strategy at Ex Populus
Soban Saqib is responsible for strategic planning and working with third-party games at Ex Populus. Soby is a futurist and digital asset veteran whose career has been characterized by early insights into emerging trends. Within this space, Sobie is known as one of the few collectors with a deep technical understanding of NFTs. Prior to co-founding Ex Populus, Sobie served as strategic leader at an artificial intelligence startup focused on natural language processing that was incubated at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is responsible for bringing high-profile figures into the Web3 space, such as Odell Beckham Jr. He is an active representative in Arbitrum's governance. He has a strong investment record as an angel investor, including investments in Berachain, Parallel and Offchain Labs.
Mark C. Harris — Chief Creative Officer, Ex Populus
Mark C. Harris has contributed to some of the animation industry's best-known films and most celebrated studios. A veteran animator, Harris' work spans 14 films, including an Annie Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Character Animation on "The Good Dinosaur." Harris has held several leadership roles at Pixar, including directing animator on Cars 3, supervising animator on Pixar's first feature-length series, Win or Lose, and is currently directing a Pixar-produced short film. In 2015, Harris was a key member of the team that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for Borrowed Time, on which Harris served as supervising animator and co-writer. Harris was also the animation director on The Crow: Legend, a cinematic VR experience that won multiple Emmy Awards for Animation and an Annie Award for Outstanding Virtual Reality Production. Harris looks forward to bringing his animation, directing and storytelling skills to the fully interactive medium of game development.
3. Offchain Labs
Offchain Labs is a US laboratory entity: Offchain Labs works under the guidance of the Xai Foundation and focuses on the development and ongoing technical support of the Xai blockchain. Offchain Labs is a key strategic technology partner for the Xai blockchain project, which was developed to solve the problems Ex Populus encountered with other blockchains when trying to deploy its games.
Offchain Labs is responsible for:
Focus on the core development and technical support of the Xai blockchain under the guidance of the Xai Foundation.
Provide marketing support to the Xai project and its various initiatives.
4. Other core contributors
The project has a diverse group of core contributors, and we expect this list to expand as the ecosystem grows. Currently, key contributors include:
Team Secret: Responsible for reviewing and approving games deployed on the Xai platform based on their merits. Additionally, actively participate in the Data Availability Committee (DAC).
Thirdweb: Specializes in developing customized account abstraction technology and payment systems for games and decentralized applications (dApps) deployed on the Xai platform.
Paima Studios: Developing first-class web3 games for the Xai blockchain.
We invite you to join this vibrant community and play a key role in reshaping the gaming landscape. Let's redefine the gaming experience together.
