A crypto merger in the shadow of war
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Photo illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios. Photo courtesy of Vlad Panchenko.
After an intense year for his family, his business, and for his home country, Ukraine-born tech CEO Vlad Panchenko remains hopeful about the future.
Driving the news: He was doing the media rounds last week to announce the sale of his Web3 online store DMarket to blockchain gaming company Mythical Games.
- Although it closed in August, the deal has now been disclosed to promote the launch of the new Mythical Marketplace, a shop for Web3 collectibles and gaming goods (like DMarket, it won’t be open to customers in Russia and Belarus).
Last February, Panchenko was talking to Axios about the war he knew was coming. As Russia threatened his native Ukraine, Panchenko chartered a plane to fly his employees out.
- Most left, setting up a satellite DMarket in Montenegro. Then, seeking better infrastructure, they moved to Lisbon, about 75 employees in all.
- Panchenko, who resides in the U.S., recalls visiting his team in Montenegro and encountering a woman who worked for him with her son in a stroller, tears in her eyes. She was from Bucha, he said, a site of Russian atrocities, and she was relieved to have escaped.
- Around 25 other employees have stayed in Ukraine. DMarket, now Mythical East, has set them up with generators and Starlink devices as needed, while Russia targets the country’s power grid.
“Everything is different in a war,” Panchenko says, talking about his company’s attempts to hire more people in Ukraine and manage their safety.
As for Web3 and mythical, he’s bullish, undeterred by the FTX catastrophe, the cooling of the NFT market, the scorn hurled at NFT-based games, and the nosedive of former Web3 gaming standout Axie Infinity.
- Perhaps this is the resilient optimism that emerges amid crisis, though Panchenko is also simply a Web3 believer.
- He reminisces about paying his phone bill when he was in high school with money he earned selling items he got playing Ultima Online. So, to him, of course Web3 gaming’s play-for-profit pitch will be enticing.
Panchenko understands the gamer outcry against many Web3 games. In Dec. 2021, angry fans came for DMarket’s NFT plans for the Ukrainian-developed game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, a plan that was swiftly canceled.
- “Most of the gamers, they actually hate NFTs,” he said. “I cannot blame them.” Most of the NFTs that make it to the news, he said, were “scams.”
- “People just need to see Web3 integration into games that are actually good,” he muses. But once the war ends. When the economy improves. Then: “I know how it's going to work. It's just, it's like two plus two is four. It is always four, not three or five. Sometimes it takes time to get there.”
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