Launchpool AMA Recap - Yesports
We were happy to have Sebastian Quinn, founder of YeSports along with us for an AMA session! Yesports Is The World’s First Web 3.0 Engagement Platform for Esports and we had a wonderful and enlightening discussion between its Founder and our Community.
For anyone who missed it live, here is the recap. If you want to know when our next AMA will be, please follow us on Twitter here
Guest: Sebastian Quinn Founder of Yesports
Host: Strong Spiderman
Location: Launchpool Community Channel
Q: Please tell us a bit about yourself, your background and your involvement in the space.
A: I first stumbled down the Blockchain rabbit hole when I went to the ConsenSys conference in NYC early 2017. Having spent four (4) years working as a lawyer with a large firm supporting many early-stage companies, helping them access growing markets, such as China, I turned my sights to the blockchain companies that I met during the conference and started assisting them in areas such as token sales marketing and general advisory.
Throughout 2017 and beyond, I was fortunate enough to work with some of the most successful and most enduring companies in the space, including AirSwap, Status.IM, Bluzelle, Simple Token and Power Ledger.
I also worked with several pioneers in the space, such as setting up the first AI+ Blockchain Accelerator with the NASDAQ listed JD.com.
The last 2 years I’ve been building the leading DeFi product on Algorand — Yieldly — which we have grown to 100m+ in TVL, 30K+ users, lot and lots of NFT tech etc.
In fact it was through this journey and the epic response to our NFT tech that a number of leading global esports teams reached out asking us how we could help them.
Q: Could you tell us about the rest of the Team?
A: We are lucky though as our team has deep expertise in blockchain, esports and technology.
We have years of development and product design between all absolutely dedicated to creating great products that add value to our users and customers.
Our head of esports Dimitris has been endemic to esports for about 12 years, he’s what some would term a grandfather of the industry having been around since the days of Starcraft, working in places supporting Fortnites global expansion and more recently at Partner Esports, which has represented a number of leading teams and streamers.
Many of our team members have experience launching incredible technology that is used by tens of thousands of users — such as Yieldly.finance — which now has over 3.2 million transactions and over 33k users.
Our tech lead for the product, Jackson; to date has come to us from work with groups such as ImmutableX
We are also fortunate to have Anthony as senior Dev with Blockchain & Full Stack developer with rich experience and professional skill in developing NFT marketplace, DeFi and dApps. Such as Algorand’s first NFT marketplace Dartroom.xyz
There’s a whole host of other great folks, advising and building, including the former head of Paypals Global Strategy for Blockchain. We also have current VP of BD Globally for Binance supporting us as well. So, a deep tech team complemented by extremely well-connected folks to drive gamers into web3 world.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve? What is the overall vision for the project?
A: The gamer esports community is around a 500m+ strong user group (on monthly users’ basis globally).
The market is worth $332B globally.
As it stands there is no single project out there focused exclusively on the esports market. To drive those gamers into the crypto market place.
We have worked with the leading esports teams for 6+ months (ever since receiving the Polygon builders grant) to deep dive into what matters most to esport users.
Our product is the culmination of those needs.
For example, we saw today that Microsoft is buying Activision for around 70B to drive that game into the Metaverse.
This speaks to the huge amount of interest in delivering great products for this market.
By creating engaging exciting platforms that takes fan2team interactions to the next level specifically for esports
Think — NFT reward access cards — with all kind of rewards — from platform
Q: How are you differentiated from other similar projects?
A: So, as it stands there are no other projects going niche on the esports web3 platform front.
We have seen great projects lead the way to build fan tokens, or creator token economies + this year we have seen the growth in p2e game space for crypto fans.
We are fortunate to have global top tier esports teams, partners already signed with Yesports — so we can proudly be considered the largest esports web3 platform
We are also partnered with Polygon Studios — they were so excited by our concept and abilities they offered us a significant grant to build our vision. This means we are the fortunate recipients of a huge pipeline of top tier esports, NFT p2e games, and other leading businesses that are contacting polygon to assess how they will deliver web3 for esport, gaming and their ecosystems.
We were opportune to be the first true cross chain platform for esports in crypto. We have a great and growing community in Algorand that we are able to build cross chain functionality for and bring esports fans into a world where they start to user more than just NFT and esports tech, but also start to use the multitude of DeFi products that we have also built and are currently enjoyed. We are very excited for the cross over potential here as well.
Our VC partners have supported this vision — today we announced our heavily oversubscribed pre-seed raise by world class investors — closing the round in less than 1 month in 2021.
There is a great article in esports insider today about that, which we would encourage the community to read about.
When you look at the support from teams, support from VC and coupled with the vast expertise our team has on crypto and esports — it becomes clear why our partners and teams are excited to be taking this journey with us.
Q: Where are you at in your roadmap? Could you please talk us through the next steps.
A: We take building products as the priority. So, with all the things we do we want to make sure the products we are building matter. So we have had our dev team working hard to deliver MVP1 in Q1.
NFT marketplace for esports teams with regular team drops in EOQ1, NFT Access Cards — NFTs that do much more than sit in your wallet — there are all kinds of rewards you unlock access to with the Yesports NFTSs — we are building out that functionality and reward system (eg, rare NFT drops, platform discounts and more)
We received our first Audit back from Halborn on the MVP 1 NFT marketplace this week. Glad to see we got all green ticks for the product.
With the tech product underdevelopment, we also have been spending a lot of time making sure our product is fit for purpose.
So we have been locking in partners and teams — of which we have 5 teams signed and more to come.
Lock in core partners — of which we have ~10 global leading partners who are incredibly excited to be apart of this.
All of whom give us feedback.
We also are building out the cross-chain staking functionality to allow for a multi-chain launch of the token in Polygon and Algorand to allow the community we have built to come along this NFT and Web3 journey with us as well.
We’ll have staking for the token post TGE, we’ll have an IDO lined up with a leading IDO platform. We have a number of leading high growth CEXs that are roaring to launch our token day 1.
So on the Yesports launch side, there’s a heck of a lot of momentum there as well to get the token out there and usable, by as many of the esports and crypto community as possible.
We’ll be updating the website this month to go into a lot more detail here with these partnerships and launch announcement as well.
We should be having 30k NFTs ready to go out this quarter across our teams which will be amazing to start seeing go live and into the wild.
Q: How was the project funded up to this point? How will the funds from the AME be used?
A: Funding for Yesports came early from Polygon Studios via a builder’s grant.
Polygon Studios = Gaming and NFT arm of Polygon focused on growing the global Blockchain Gaming and NFT Industry and bridging the gap between Web 2 and Web 3 gaming through investment, marketing and developer support.
Builder’s grant enabled us to secure world’s top global esports teams — Renegades, Team Empire — to get licensor rights for NFTs at relatively high cost, enabling us to ensure that from day 1, we’d have big esports fan base
In addition to that, as mentioned earlier — we’ve closed an oversubscribed 2.25M pre-seed round for Yesports, letting us:
Scale independent developer team.
Expand the rights acquisitions with more teams (announcements coming soon)
From here we have been working with an incredible partner network to grow funding to help us develop and create this esports web3 vision.
The AME will used to help us further our development — we are creating what no one else has for Yesports — the teams and expertise we require — are truly specialized which means a significant resource pool is needed to ensure talent is acquired and kept.
Q: Are there any strategic partners (excluding Launchpool) that you can share?
A: 100% — Notably we have been anchored by the Polygon Studio’s team (powerhouse in gaming industry) and we are now their leading service tech provider for launching esports into Web3 (NFTs, p2e)
Our VC partner network is vast and the list of top tier partners is notable;
Polygon Studios, Spartan, MEXC, KOSMOS, YBB, Mozaik Capital, Zipmex, Alphabit, NGC Ventures, Kernel Ventures, GTA Ventures, IBMR
We were very deliberate with choosing our partners — picking those who have strong focus on p2e and will bring their bases to Yesports
In collaboration with p2E games and looking to launch in game NFTs. Chatting with some of biggest guilds out there
Looking at other EVM compatible layer 1 that have growing gamified and p2e communities and building our product so that we can bring those worlds together cross-chain
There’s a tone in the pipeline, but we want to make sure that we announce some of the new esports partners in the press soon so we have the largest impact for all our community.
We also have some world first tech to connect our polygon ecosystem with the Algorand ecosystem as well, which will delight our community on Algorand as well.
Q: What made you choose Launchpool as your launchpad partner for the AME?
A: Launchpool has an incredible history for launching successful projects and we are proud to be given the opportunity to be another successful case study.
The sheer size and dedication of the Launchpool network and proven previous track record of success, made this a no brainer for us and we hope that our project continues this great tradition.
Additionally, we are also lucky enough to have Alphabit as a partner and supporter of Yesports and of yours as well.
We also hope to be able to leverage the network of gamefi and p2e type projects and find ways to proactively integrated with them and vice versa.
Q: What is the total allocation you’ve set aside for the Launchpool Community? Are there any limitations or is the Allocation Mining Event open to everyone? Please list any countries that are excluded from the allocation event due to regulatory reasons.
A: We have set aside 500k for the community. We don’t have any specific limitations on quantity, but obviously we want to make sure it is fair.
In terms of the limitations, our lawyers are telling us the following: Anyone not domiciled in the USA, Australia or UN Sanctioned countries can participate.
Q: What happens after the AME? Could you talk us through the tokenomics: total supply, initial circulating supply, initial market cap, initial vesting, total vesting period etc.
A: Key for us is Product
This quarter we will Launch the v1 NFT marketplace with our esports teams. We will be minting ~10k NFTs per team we sign.
Token pathway.
We have received offers from exchanges and platforms to run IDOs with them. We are also in discussions with other large brand name IDO platforms to launch the token. We will aim to have IDO by March too.
We’ll share the tokenomics with the community after the AMA, but essentially its fixed cap. TGE launch will be between 40–60m FDV (based on where the IDO platforms guide us). The AME will be at 33m FDV. Vesting will be quarterly for a year.
Oh and I should mentioned the market cap at listing will be around 6m.
Q: What are the use cases for the token? Do you have any mechanisms planned to support the DeFi component?
A: The $YESP token will power the Yesports Web3 Engagement Platform whereby $YESP can be used for First access/whitelisting
Staking and multi asset rewards — including staking YESP to earn YESP.
Voting and governance rights.
Receiving platform discounts.
We will also have a deflationary buyback/burn feature built into post mvp versions of the app.
We’ve worked with leading advisors to make sure that we are maximizing the utility of the token for users as the product continues to develop.
COMMUNITY QUESTIONS
Q: I wondered how your existing community would link into Yesports?
A: For the Algorand Community we are building direct pathway across via
a) bridge for the $YESP token.
b) staking for $YESP token and DeFi token that exists.
c) increased collaboration for where the NFTs are able to be sold. — E.g we’re working with cross chain NFT solutions providers to see how to deliver NFTs to chains that users want.
Q: I would like to ask if there is any room for VR later in the future.
A: We would love to see that; we are exploring the best way to deliver that. The VR world is undergoing a huge amount of growth right now and so we are looking at who is the best partner or what is the best platform that would deliver that type of experience.
Q: Is there any possibility for NFT’s minting on BSC or Polygon chains?
A: The NFT tech is designed to mint on Polygon chain. Going forward it’s possible and feasible to see how it could be minted on ASA, BSC or elsewhere.
Q: Are you planning to launch an NFT marketplace at Yesports? Where people can sell Yesports NFTs and their own NFTs or what are your plans regarding NFT marketplace at Yesports?
A: Yes, that is the product that has just been the subject of an audit. So it would be launched at day one. Initially it will be curated NFT marketplace where the teams will launch their collections.
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Please visit our website:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yesports_gg?s=11
Telegram Group: https://t.me/yesports_gg
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/yesportsannouncement
Discord: https://discord.gg/bKR5enZDWH
