Exploring the Roblox of Web3 with Portals feat. Co-Founder Adam Gomez

GM GM! Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you don't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast online; founders, hackers and anyone in between have the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they build. And today I'm ecstatic to welcome Adam Gomez, who is the founder of Portals. So if you're not familiar, Portals is a no-code game platform that lets anyone create and explore immersive games and worlds in the browser. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Adam, learn about Portals, and how you can get started with the platform today. All right, let's get into it!

GM GM! Welcome to the show, Adam. Pleasure to have you on, man. No problem, thank you for coming on. Yeah, I guess before we get into all the great content you have around Portals, would you just like to give a brief introduction about yourself if folks aren't familiar?

Yeah, yeah. So I'm the CEO of Portals. We started this back in 2021 as a passion project. It was about three developers building this out. My background was in games and software. I had always been very much a gamer, fascinated by the games industry, working in the games industry pretty early on in my career. And this idea for Portals came about when we were just obsessed with it, could not stop thinking about it and said, you know, let's... we're not really sure how we're going to get this funded and what this can become, but we can't stop thinking about it. Let's just start building it and see what happens. So that was kind of the origin back in 2021.

Nice, man. Yeah, I mean a lot of these new-age projects kind of start this way. It's like a group of friends kind of come together, they either want to build something fun or solve a particular problem they have, and then it ends up being this awesome kind of experience where you guys end up building a company. And that seems like what's happened here. Indeed, indeed. These are the best ones. Yeah, and I guess, how did you find yourself in the world of technology and crypto? Like, what led you to this space, other than this hackathony-type project?

Yeah, um, so like I mentioned, games is always kind of what drove me. I think a lot of programmers these days, you'll find, did get started with just kind of an interest in games. How are games made? Can I make my own game? And that's what got me into programming pretty early on. And kind of never stopped. I was always interested in kind of making hobby games.

And it wasn't until about 20... let's see, I actually got into crypto pretty early on just from the technical perspective. It seemed kind of interesting as like a nerdy thing. Internet money, didn't fully understand kind of the mission of it, and didn't really dive into crypto until a little bit later, maybe 2020 is when I really started getting deeper into it. But the concept of Bitcoin was pretty interesting. Bought some Bitcoin back then, sold it at a loss... this was back in like 2013-2014. And, but yeah, it wasn't really until the concepts of smart contracts and everything that Ethereum represented really kind of captured my interest to dive deeper and start playing around with the tech.

So yeah, DeFi summer, all of that was really when we kind of really started diving in. And it wasn't until let's see, 2021, kind of Solana came on our radar. And as kind of our background in the games and software world, up to that point we're very focused on product and user experience. And when we first saw Solana, it was very interesting from that perspective, from a user experience perspective.

It looked like it was pretty advanced in terms of low transaction speeds, the wallet experience was just a lot better. Back in 2021 there was, you know, it was pretty... the hype for crypto was kind of fever pitch back then as like the next wave of the internet, and if there was going to be a consumer platform that was more accessible, it looked like Solana was very kind of primed for that. So that's how it caught our attention. We ended up taking what we had been building with Portals, which initially was never actually intended to be a crypto project, we had already been building it for six months, seven months, this kind of prototype. And basically saw that there was a lot of interest for what we were building in the crypto space.

So you probably remember the metaverse narrative and hype cycle. Broadly, right, it wasn't just crypto. Crypto folks I think saw some really interesting, truly interesting things, things that are that we still find interesting about how crypto and the metaverse fit together in terms of interoperable assets and worlds and games and all of these things. Obviously broadly, I think the narrative around the metaverse, a lot of folks, that term ended up carrying a lot of negative connotations both inside of crypto and outside of crypto because I think the general conception was, you know, Facebook's, you know, live in the metaverse VR, whatever that sort of idea was. I think is what, you know, ended up becoming more of like the mainstream conception of what the metaverse is.

And not too many people wanted that. It seemed like something that, you know, Facebook was sort of forcing, and Facebook has kind of, you know, gone away from leaning too heavily into that at this point as well. But the piece that was always really interesting to us and is still very interesting to us is the interoperability of the games and the worlds and really the games universe side of what the metaverse means. So both Roblox, Fortnite, they're known, you know, their founders call those platforms metaverse platforms because you can go in and create and they're social and multiplayer, and that's really kind of how those platforms are defined.

And we've always seen that as a huge opportunity with what we're doing with Portals. What was most exciting was we've seen how 3D technology has kind of come to the browser for the first time. And that's ultimately what the kernel of the idea was for Portals was: Could you take, you know, a Nintendo-quality next-gen Roblox-like platform and put it in the browser where the graphics look awesome?

One of the advantages of doing it in the browser is, let's say somebody's playing a game that's built in Portals and they're playing it on stream on Twitch, on YouTube, and their live audience of 10,000 people can see this game that's being played, they see that the streamer is having a ton of fun, and they could just click a link and now they're in. So the barrier to entry, you know, you don't need to go to Steam and download a game and pay money upfront and whatever else it is. It's like: This is an amazing-looking game, looks really fun, I'm definitely clicking that link. So your conversion rate of just folks being able to jump in, your accessibility is just way, way higher.

So that was always really exciting to us and then just from a product perspective, we always wanted to lower the barrier to entry on the developer side as well. So we were inspired by things like Animal Crossing or there's a game on PlayStation called Little Big Planet which was very accessible. So even if you've never made games before, these platforms kind of allowed you to express your creativity. Little Big Planet in particular, you know, built this huge audience of folks that were just, you know, obsessed with creating things because it was so fun and charming and easy to create things.

And it felt, you know, there was a lot of fun in the creation aspect. So those two pieces were really the foundation for Portals as far as easy to get into via the browser and the accessibility from that standpoint, and then accessibility from the building side of things where it's just easier to create. So it becomes a lot easier for anybody to create levels and games and worlds and all that. So that's really been kind of the two foundational pillars for Portals.

And then like I mentioned, lots of excitement in the world of crypto for the metaverse. And it's like we were definitely at the right place at the right time with what we were building, where we had this kind of ambitious vision for building the next generation Roblox and found Solana, submitted the prototype of Portals into their hackathon, implemented Solana, and what had gone from a very sort of small-scale project in terms of a couple of people working in their apartments on this passion project, there was like a spotlight on us overnight with this hackathon and investors really wanting to invest in the project and all that. So it was kind of a real awesome opportunity.

And you know, we've had to kind of evolve with the changing tastes of the market and what crypto and what consumer crypto means and all that. But we've never kind of lost sight of our ultimate goal of building a platform that is mainstream and does kind of get looked at as a next-gen Roblox. So there's definitely the crypto side of Portals that has really been our foundation and where we've been building and focusing over the last four years, but ultimately have been working towards that. Okay, now it's time for mainstream adoption and scale, which is kind of right where we're at, which is we're kind of in a really exciting period where we're moving into starting to get Portals out there more broadly.

And I mean, you guys have chosen a great vertical to kind of explore. I mean, the whole gaming and crypto sector, I think is like a lot of people kind of brush it off because they're like: How is crypto going to work with games and this, that, and the other thing? But, if a lot of people who are new to crypto don't realize, there aren't actually a lot of usable apps out there. A lot of things in this sector are very much infra and built for developers, and we haven't seen... well we're starting to see now, but there really hasn't been too many apps that are just apps, but you don't know that crypto is kind of behind the scenes or blockchain is kind of behind the scenes powering it. Being able to build games in like a Roblox experience I think is a pretty dope way to kind of bridge that gap from regular user to crypto, right?

Totally. Yeah, I think so many people are disillusioned, even folks that are very crypto native with the sort of lack of more mainstream applications. And it's been a lot of infrastructure. I think the important thing to underline is there really hadn't even been functional blockchains until pretty recently. Scalable blockchains, and you're just starting to see the first kind of mainstream consumer applications that are built on blockchain like Polymarket and Kalshi I think are pretty good examples. And there's more coming for sure, right? So we're still very bullish on that on what's kind of happening. As we should be.

Before we continue on, I want to bring up a question here from the crowd. So Angi asks: "I am kinda mediocre Unreal Engine building. I can build environments, but when trying to make gameplay, I'm not there. Is it easier to build a game with Portals compared with Unreal?"

Absolutely, absolutely it is. And that's so both Fortnite, Roblox, Fortnite is kind of built on that Unreal foundation, which requires a whole lot of learning of the tools to be able to create anything. So one of the cool things, you know, one of the things that we definitely built into the very foundation of Portals was making it as easy as humanly possible to get into and start having fun and creating and actually turn folks that maybe never were going to learn how to code or go into Unreal and learn all the complicated tools but sort of found themselves kind of going deeper and deeper into Portals where it's like it's so accessible.

It's like: Wow, I'm making a level now, I'm making a... what else can I do with this? So we've had tons of people over the lifetime of the project get into Portals start sort of with that foundation of: I'm just going to poke around and start maybe, you know, drop a tree here or drop a little robot in a box here, and it evolves into: I've built a whole city now. That was really fun, that was cool. They're spending tons and tons of time just using Portals kind of like digital Lego. And from there they've evolved and become full-on game developers where they're now creating games.

I'll actually pull up... put something on screen here because this is a really cool example. So some of these games that you're seeing here in this video were all part of a recent game jam that we did. And it's the same case for all of these creators where they've never created games before, are non-coders, but they got into Portals and were able to learn how to kind of create games basically without ever learning how to code and getting into this.

So there's some examples here of some folks that did follow that path of kind of using Portals as like digital Lego. This is one of the submissions and now they're making full-on games with storylines and cutscenes and doing amazing things where we're helping these creators now get their games built in Portals more mainstream attention. So helping them with tools that get their game out there on TikTok where people can put in their email address and say: You know, this game that you're making which is like Resident Evil definitely has a lot of Resident Evil vibes this one called The Doll Maker and we're getting it out there.

We're showing that even if you started off just kind of interested in Portals as like a, you know, this is kind of cool digital Lego, how it can totally take a life of its own, that little hobby turning into I'm releasing games now that are getting tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people interested in this game. And more and more people that have been building in Portals for the last couple years that we've been out there are starting to turn this into a full career. So they're switching careers basically to become like game developers. So really, really exciting, fulfilling work to kind of see that happening.

Yeah, this looks amazing and I was just looking at a comment on X. Iculas says: "someone should make a build out of Mordor Isengard environment in Portals" because my background is Mordor. I've been Mordor quite a bit. But yeah, this looks quite amazing and this is open for anybody to come in and take a stab at building their own environment?

Yeah, yeah. Unless you've been pretty deep into the kind of the Solana space, the Solana communities and Solana Twitter, you probably haven't seen too much of Portals. We had kind of been building out the platform, building out its capabilities and more recently opened it up where anybody can go in, create an account, and start choosing from templates. So you can start: Mountain Village, actually I think the Mordor this level there's a big like lava volcano behind him and just start creating.

I think actually one of the other this is kind of a Mordor-like level which was a really cool again this game was kind of built in a couple of days with the no-code tools and a week later everybody's kind of pouring in and competing to go in and mint. This was kind of crypto audience-focused as most of our stuff has been up to this point. Bunch of people pouring in to try and mint one of the collectibles, one of the outfits in the game by completing it, by being one of the first people to complete it. So yeah, now it's completely open to everybody to just go in and start poking around and creating.

Amazing. And there's a question here again in the crowd from Angi: "Is this like a desktop experience like the builder or is it completely in browser?"

It's completely in browser.

Oh awesome. There you go, Angi. Regardless of what side you are on the PC versus Mac spectrum, you can indeed go ahead and play around with Portals.

Yeah, all this footage is shot in-browser.

Oh wow. And I noticed there's also a Portals token component. Could you tell us what the utility is there and how does it work with the Portals platform?

Yeah definitely. I think one of the most powerful aspects of crypto and tokens that I think most people see and realize is how you can decentralize the efforts towards building out that platform and building more games. So one of the things that we have been doing, both a mix of cash and tokens but for folks that are kind of seeing the opportunity here and really doing their due diligence on the broader games market and understanding that there have been a lot of attempts at competing with Roblox, but were never really fully on the money in terms of how are they doing that? What is interesting and new and different about this platform that's going to do that?

And I think folks are seeing really in the last 10 years, there's really only one platform that is doing it sort of demonstrating that these elements of it being in-browser and easy to build with are extremely powerful. So now as we're kind of doing that starting to move into our mainstream push, having that mix of folks where they're in crypto, there's whether it's a 10,000 or 100,000 in cash funding for: Here's a game that we want created, submit your application because this is your team and this is your idea for what you want to get created. Tokens are involved with that where you can again kind of see broadly there's a really really big opportunity here.

You know, if there's how many platforms do have that kind of mass market consumer application the same way that Polymarket and Kalshi have sort of shown. So I think that's one just really I think really important piece to how tokens are powerful and why they're important to crypto projects. Meanwhile you have there's a whole white paper that talks about how all of the different elements of the token tie into the economy and the assets and everything else, which is kind of a deeper deeper dive but ultimately it's really from that perspective of being able to utilize the token and kind of build value into the network as one of them.

But all kinds of different utility. One other thing I'll mention is there's some specific functionality with how we designed Portals to be interesting even for short-term traders. So I won't spend too much time on that, but there's a lot of elements that that we thought were important because crypto markets really aren't at a place yet where people are buying tokens and they're not trading at multiples of future cash flow necessarily yet. A lot of it still is kind of driven by speculation and hype and other factors. So we have kind of baked in some interesting reasons to kind of keep people on their toes and have Portals be very interesting kind of from a short-term perspective.

And I'll just give you just a quick example of that where with that incubator, some of those incubator pieces that I mentioned, the same way Virtuals works (I'm not sure how familiar you are with Virtuals and how they're kind of tokenomics are structured) where they're creating liquidity pools with the base Virtual token. So when new projects are launching and launching their own tokens on the platform, that Virtual token forms a liquidity pool and sort of creates a sink for the token.

So we're doing a lot of that as well where folks are able to launch their own tokens within Portals to kind of power their own mini-game studios, their own game worlds, and we're putting a lot of energy behind that so that they're having successful launches and then that's leading to a pretty significant token sink and that's kind of one of those short-term mechanics. So that's yet to roll out yet but yeah that's kind of coming soon.

Awesome. Awesome. And yeah, one of my next questions was what's next on the roadmap for you guys? Can you share any alpha that might be coming in 2026?

Yeah, yeah. So we just made a post on our Discord the other day that kind of goes into more of the plan and how we're ready for mainstream adoption and kind of just a rehashing some of the things that we had seen over the years in terms of where we're breaking out of the the biggest opportunity really is breaking out of the crypto bubble and going mainstream. And here's kind of all the evidence that we've seen with our testing with whether it's TikTok reaching out to us and saying: How are you guys converting so many people? How are you guys doing that where so many people are signing up with emails?

And these were tests that we were showing, you know, there's a lot of interest for what we're building here outside of crypto circles. So other examples like that, you know, we've been a lot of Twitch streamers with millions of followers have been reaching out to us. They've heard about Portals and they really do see it as a next-gen Roblox and are wanting to stream it and get it in front of their audience. So we're just kind of covering very high level here's the plan on how that's going to work. We're releasing a deeper dive document that really gets into the nitty-gritty: Here's the objective for the next 3 to 6 months, here are the obstacles that we know are in front of us.

Some of those being gamers in the Web2 world are against crypto by and large, and they can be very opinionated about that. You just have to be handled very carefully. We have seen examples of some of the other games, I'm not sure if you've heard of Off The Grid, they did more of a Web2 push on Twitch and did it pretty successfully in terms of the reception from the general gaming crowd where most of the crypto stuff is behind the scenes. Some of the streamers that were playing it that do have influence and are sort of tastemakers in the games industry broadly were like: The crypto piece makes sense. Like: Why would you build your own Steam marketplace if you wanted to have a marketplace of assets in your game when you could just use the blockchain? It's already there, you can use it as a marketplace and it makes total sense.

So things like that, if it's kind of approached in the right way, crypto shouldn't be a blocker. But anyway, there's a large long document that goes into our objectives, the obstacles, what we're doing, metrics that we're going to be watching that other people ought to be watching in terms of how fast we're trying to grow and that front. So that's one of the things that's coming up. And then we also get into more of the kind of crypto audience-focused stuff that comes out with Portals on a regular basis.

So new games, we did a big loot box drop last year with, you know, hundreds of thousands of visits to Portals where we just airdropped every single Solana community a bunch of Portals loot boxes. They can take those NFTs into Portals to open the loot boxes and it just brought, you know, tens of thousands of people into Portals all at once and was a really fun activation. So we're doing more of that, you know, tie-ins with the Portals token.

We're doing on-chain trading that we're rolling out with Portals so you can create a space and if you're let's say part of PENGU or any crypto community that you want to build a space for and set up in-game trading where you can trade PENGU or whatever other token you'd like in-game. You could do that and you as a creator are able to, you know, collect fees on on that. And, you know, we have even integrations... I won't mention the specific ones yet, but with some of the prediction markets, there's integrations where people can jump in and do prediction market trading in spaces as well. And these are all tools that are available to creators to kind of tap into and use.

Yeah, lot lots of things coming on the on the crypto audience side of things as well that that people are excited about. So that post on our Discord does go into that and we'll get, you know, that broken down into content that's going to go out on Twitter as well that people can check out. But yeah, lot lot of stuff coming. It's a very very busy exciting exciting time.

Yeah, it certainly sounds like you got a lot lot of great stuff coming down the pipeline. And I mean like perps on gamers competing against each other, I think that would be pretty that would be pretty cool and a duality to it, right? It's going to be there. Yeah, as we're coming to time, you mentioned it, what's the best way for people to keep up to date with everything that's going on with Portals? You mentioned following on X and Discord. What's the best way for people to get involved?

Yeah, I would definitely say follow Portals on X, hop into the Discord if you have any questions or interested about like creating things in Portals, getting to know the community. We have an absolutely amazing community that's always willing to help people get up to speed and learn how to create things on the platform and just answer any questions about our long-term plans and mainstream adoption push starting to happen and all that. So yeah, I'd say yeah X and Discord are definitely the place to start. Excellent. And that will also sorry, the Portals website, theportal.to if you want to jump in and play around with creating a space, playing some of the games that are out there. Website is getting kind of a whole refresh where we're highlighting the games and you can jump in and play them. It is kind of more geared towards that mainstream audience so you'll be seeing that. But Portals website, X and Discord are good place to start.

Excellent. And yeah, we'll have those all linked for you in the description of this podcast below. I want to get in a couple of questions that came in late in the crowd. From tired-dev: "how can people discover games built on Portals?"

Yeah, so the new website will be highlighting kind of the best games. Again kind of going into if you were Steam Portals, so that's one one place. TikTok, Twitch, that is also starting to roll out in terms of streamers that are playing some of the featured games and then from there you know they'll they'll be sending you to the Portals website where you can kind of jump into that game that they're playing but then also browse other games that that are available to play, some of the other ones that are upcoming. So yeah, it'll mostly be the the website, Portals X if you're in the crypto space will also be a good place to kind of see you know what what new stuff is is coming out.

Good stuff. Great question and great answer. And finally, how for for the content creators out there that are building the games, how how can they make revenue off of their creations?

Yeah so partly there's a few different ways. One with the crypto natives that are building on the platform, they're often creating things that are more crypto audience focused as well. So we just released those tools where they're able to integrate you know trading in spaces. A lot of folks are and have been building games that are that are more geared towards mainstream audiences without kind of the crypto stuff. And that's where we've been kind of helping them build up their their audience for those games to be released. We're also funding through whether it's game jams or more specific funding for: Here's a game that we know there's kind of a hunger for in the market that we'd love to see created, here's the budget for it, here's kind of the timeline that we're expecting.

So we're kind of like a mini-game publisher in that in that sense for these types of games. So we are also internally creating games for this next push to be examples of: Hey you can make a game in Portals and it can do millions in revenue. That'll start to get you know more developer attention. But game jams are also really fun cool way to get started where we're doing prizes, mostly crypto native audiences but we've also been starting to move the game jams into kind of more mainstream mainstream audiences as well. So the game jams always have really cool prizes; cash prizes, tokens if they're you know on the crypto side. So that's one way that people have like gotten their start or it's like I'm just going to you know we just did a horror game jam with Atari and Block of Horror and tons of awesome awesome horror themed games were created and yeah we'll be highlighting those so check those out on the Portals X. We'll have a place where you can browse all of those games that were created. So yeah if you're interested the game jam is usually a really good place to start so more of those are rolling out.

Yeah, another question is like when's the next one?

Yeah, should be so we actually have a builder competition this month so be on the lookout for that and we'll probably have our next more major game jam in in January.

Amazing and yeah unfortunately that that brings us to time. Adam thank you so much again for coming on the show today. I thought I thought this was pretty neat and I know a lot of people in the crowd probably thought the same. So definitely going to keep keep the eyes on Portals going forward here. So with that I just want to say thank you again. Thank you for the audience for joining us today and happy Tuesday, happy rest of the week to everybody and hope everybody has a great Solana Breakpoint. I know that's coming up tomorrow and this week. So if you're going there hope everybody enjoys.

Awesome. Appreciate it.

My pleasure. All right all, have a good one. Cheers!