Launchpool AMA Recap — Yesports
Launchpool x Yesports AMA Summary
Place: Launchpool Discord Community
Date & Time: Monday, August 29th, 12:00pm UTC
Guests: Matthew David and Tim Han
Host: Mickie (Launchpool Team)
Launchpool was excited to host Matthew David and Tim Han of Yesports for an interactive Ask-Me-Anything session with the Launchpool Community. The session lasted approximately 1hr and consisted of questions from the Launchpool Team as well as questions from the Community.
Questions from the Launchpool Team
Mickie: Let’s kick off this AMA!
Hello and welcome all LPOOLers, as many in our Community already know, today we have an AMA session with the Yesports team.
Yesports Is The World’s First Web 3.0 Engagement Platform for Esports.
As always, the chat will be muted for roughly 30 mins whilst we ask the pre-prepared questions. After this, we will open up to questions from the Community for another 15 mins. We will also enable “Slow Mode” for all questions.
Welcome Guys!
Tim Han: Hello Mickie, great to be here and thanks for having us!
Mickie: The pleasure is mine. Please could you give our Community a quick reminder about the Yesports project.
Tim Han: Yes of course, in short: Yesports is the world’s largest web3 eSports engagement platform.
We are working with 10 globally ranked esports teams and pro players with over 30 million fans to deliver:
~ Scalable NFT memberships with epic fan rewards
~ Gamified NFT Launchpad and marketplace for gamers and eSports
~ Metaverse as a service for global esports orgs.
This means we are larger than any other web3 product out there in terms of reach and utility for the eSports and gaming market.
Mickie: Could you tell us about the main developments since the raise?
Tim Han: Yes I'd love to. Firstly, let’s dive into our first product to be released.
3 Tiered NFT Memberships
The largest eSports group in HK and Thailand, “Talon Esports” will be the first to go live with this. Our NFT membership tech stack allows teams to input bespoke, fan-first customizable experiences across 3 membership tiers for fans to purchase.
By holding an NFT membership, fans access a whole host of utilities in both digital and IRL settings. Fans can expect to unlock utility options including, signed merch, VIP tickets, VOD reviews and even personal coaching sessions with players.
Secondly, we are building out unique team storefronts that allow fans to browse and bid on a wide range of NFTs for sale such as rare 1/1s, team collectibles and even in-game memorable moments. What’s really great about this is it allows fans to cut through the ‘noise’ of current NFT marketplaces that are saturated in a mismatch of different NFT art options to focus on exactly what they are there for — their team’s memorabilia.
Further down the line we will unveil our eSports-centric metaverse that will open up even further engagement options for both teams and fans.
Our teams are really excited to start building their unique digital space where they can engage with fans via in-world livestreams and exclusive NFT holder only events. We envisage the metaverse to be a hub for all things eSports and a digital world where eSports fans, Play-2-Earn and Web3 communities can come together and participate in eSports & gaming events.
We’ll also be weaving gamification into the marketplace environment to make it an attractive place for all web3 native users to be, so expect stake-to-win features as well!
Mickie: This sounds great. How are you tracking against your roadmap? Could you please talk us through the next steps.
Tim Han: Sure thing. Our TGE is just around the corner, which will go hand in hand with the platform going live. The first team to be going live with the platform is one SEA’s biggest eSport teams, Talon Esports, releasing their NFT fan memberships.
Here’s a good overview of what to expect — the major highlights
Talon Membership NFTs To Launch End Of Month
TGE Is Inbound
INFINITY — LATAMs Largest Esports Team Will Be Launching NFT Memberships In September
More Professional Team Partnership Announcements
The Yesports Secondary Marketplace Released In Q3
Our $YESP Range Of Staking Products In Q3/Q4
P2E Partnerships & Games Are Also In The Pipeline
As we look further towards the end of the year and 2023, we have some amazing releases on the horizon including our eSports-centric metaverse in Q4 2022 /Q1 2023. This will be a digital world for eSports teams to host exclusive live events, engage fans or even livestream their events
The long-term vision is to keep building out the platform and bringing on new teams from around the globe alongside focusing on the P2E space and how Yesports can offer our services to guilds and gamers across Web3.
Mickie: Wow, there’s really a lot going on. You guys must be really busy. Can you talk us through the longer-term vision for the NFTs, how it interacts with the industry and what are the use cases within its own ecosystem?
Tim Han: Great question. Here at Yesports, we believe strongly in utility-first NFTs. Otherwise, it will be tough for an NFT to maintain its value in the long-term.
A recent Yesports press release covered by the likes of Esports Insider talked about how we have released our NFT memberships-as-a-service(mentioned above). These NFT memberships allow teams to provide fan-first utility customization. That is each NFT membership collection is completely unique and utility options are decided by the teams based on the needs of their fans.
The truth is most esports or even sports teams will not have the technical knowledge or time to be exploring web3 and trying to engage their fans there. Therefore they are keen on partnering with a trusted technology provider, like Yesports.
What we do is — we use modular tech structures and replicable NFT membership frameworks to create these bespoke NFT memberships within a day (once the team has customized their fan memberships). This allows teams to access their millions of fans in record time, at scale, with Web3 technology.
So, on this point alone, we allow teams to create high quality, low touch, utility first NFTs for their communities. We do it at scale and quality which means some of the largest teams in the world are looking at our tech to implement.
Another incredible aspect of this tech is that each team that signs into the platform has access to their own powerfully simple set of admin controls and product dashboards, giving them a high degree of control over what the membership is/can be. So, we empower non-technical people to get all the benefits of web3 without needing to code. This is really key as an access point for our eSports partners.
We believe NFT memberships will reconceptualize the entire eSports industry, and bring a new dawn to how teams engage meaningfully with their fans in a sustainable way.
Mickie: What are the potential barriers to the project hitting its roadmap targets in 2022? And how are you preparing for these challenges?
Tim Han: Right now, we are bang on track to releasing the very first few batches of membership NFTs, beginning with Talon Esports tomorrow. We have monthly launches lined up thereafter so do keep your eyes peeled for those announcements.
While we are confident of hitting all our roadmap goals this year, we have to be sensitive towards the market conditions and launching a token into it. These things are not entirely up to us, but what we can do is to begin shipping out products as the market bounces back, so we are well-positioned to fully leverage a robust market when it comes around.
There has been a lot of traction and momentum leading up to our launch, with more interest coming from the P2E side of things as well as traditional sporting teams, so more partnerships will be made as we go along. Next year will be more challenging, as we build out some of the long-term propositions and features of our platform and begin rolling out more complex operations.
So, for barriers, we are really looking at team size and expanding that to accommodate more ambitious plans. We will be on the lookout and hiring for more Devs as well as BD/Ops roles to ensure we are well staffed on the backend and front-facing too.
Mickie: Agreed. What marketing plans do you have in store for 2022?
Tim Han: We are very lucky to have an expansive partner network. Through our esSorts teams alone, Yesports is connected to 30m+ fans across 5 continents. As a benefit, our marketing is very focused on activating partner networks with internal content creators & KOLs.
In addition to this, we have a great relationship with our Web3-based partners such as Launchpool and we will continue to engage partner communities through a range of growth campaigns much like the recent Launchpool NFT ticket giveaway that raises brand awareness.
We really are focusing on 3 pillars within the industry and activating the marketing according to the drives of each group:
1. Esports Teams
2. P2E Projects
3. Traditional Sporting Teams
We have been contacted by a great number of projects/teams in each industry above and we will lean into the partnerships as they are announced and execute a whole host of innovative & captivating marketing campaigns!
Mickie: That’s great to hear! Do you have any upcoming news or partnerships you would like to share?
Tim Han: We’d love to give you the inside scoop into some partnerships soon to be announced, however, we will have to keep that under wraps for now.
But what I can say, is that in the next two weeks we have another exciting P2E project partnership to be announced which is another step closer to building out our network of P2E partners that will use Yesports as an NFT launchpad to access the millions of eSports fans through eSporting partnerships.
Our first NFT memberships are set to launch tomorrow with Talon Esports via their very own unique team storefront accessible only through Yesports. This marks the official launch of our memberships-as-a-service product and is the result of 12 months of commitment and hard work at Yesports.
By the end of September, we will also be launching INFINITY esports, one of LATAMs leading esports teams’ NFT memberships as well alongside the launch of the Yesports marketplace.
There’s always a lot happening and we welcome all #LPOOLers to get involved as the Yesports product goes live — check out the GLEAM campaign we are co-running with Launchpool here:
✨ Special Announcement ✨
As part of Yesports’ AMA with Launchpool, we’ve teamed up to give away $500 worth of $YESP tokens to the Launchpool Community!
👉 Simply fill out the Gleam form below for a chance to win❗😎
https://gleam.io/4Dnax/enter-the-yesports-x-launchpool-500-giveaway
📌 The secret code will be shared during the Community questions so be sure to pay attention…👀
Mickie: Exciting news, I’m sure our Community members are looking forward to taking part. Where can we join your community to stay updated?
Tim Han: We are always putting stuff out on our channels so be sure to follow us to be the first to know.
Telegram
Discord
Mickie: Great! Thank you for sharing these great updates with us. I will now open up the Community to questions from the floor. Please be reminded that we have “Slow Mode” enabled and will only be answering questions related to Yesports.
Tim Han: Let’s do it!
Questions from the Launchpool Community
Question: When is TGE expected?
Tim Han: The TGE is incoming and we are looking at sometime in Sep/Oct, pending advice from some of our key partners.
Question: Are you looking at having multi chains in the future?
Tim Han: We are definitely looking to explore the possibility of cross-chain compatibility. Our tech team does have proficiency in numerous other layer-1s, so that is definitely an option.
Question: What are the plans to incentive users when teams decide to launch in a bearish trend.
Tim Han: Utility has to come first for all things we do and $YESP is no exception.
Day one we will be looking to empower our community to guide where and what we do with our teams — so governance and voting is high on the list for Day 1 utility. For example shaping which eSports to target, which pro-teams to go after, which NFTs to launch, what utility fans want to see etc.
Following from that we will have utility for early access to the platform features; such as 1st access to drops of the NFTs, access to the metaverse, and 1:1 auctions.
The final area where we’ll be gamifying use cases in the early days, will be a stake-to-win NFT use case. For example, users will stake and win NFTs via a type of NFT lottery. We see this as a fun feature for all our members to get access to any of the products on the platform. The final thing about the $YESP token is that we will divert some of the platform fees earned to buying it back on the market and reusing those $YESP for future ecosystem development.
Here is the Secret Code: ESPORTS
Question: Hello Tim, can you say when the token goes live and in which exchange?
Tim Han: As mentioned above, we have to be mindful about the broader market climate we are launching into, so we are looking at somewhere around Sep/Oct. As for exchanges, I’m sure you can appreciate that we cannot make references or disclose — what I will share is that we have been approached by numerous international exchanges and talks have been very fruitful.
Question: Partnerships are an important factor for every project. So who are your partners?
Tim Han: Last week we announced our partnership with the P2E project Klaydice, built on the Klaytn chain. This is the first step in becoming an inclusive NFT launchpad for P2E games to list their NFTs in front of the 30m+ and rapidly rising fan portal via the Yesports platform.
In addition, we have 20+ VC backers and 10+ globally ranked eSports teams and players signed onto the platform — with the first launch coming tomorrow for Talon Esports. We are excited to be announcing our next P2E partnership in the coming weeks so stay tuned as we continue to build out our gaming community network.
Mickie: If there are any more questions or if it’s unanswered here, please hop on over to the Yesports Community channel on Discord
Again, thank you Tim for your time in sharing all the info: we can’t wait for what’s ahead! Special thanks to everyone that took part!
Tim Han: Thanks to everyone, and Mickie for having us! Been a pleasure.
Mickie: This will be the end of our AMA.
About Yesports
Yesports is setting a new standard for eSports fan-2-team engagement by creating the World’s Largest Web 3.0 Engagement Platform for Esports
About Launchpool
Launchpool leverages communities, knowledge, expertise, contacts and capital to provide crypto projects with the best possible start to life, maximising their chances for success in this fast moving & dynamic space.
