SportFi and the Web3 Future of Fandom - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2023

hey good afternoon everyone thank you for joining us today uh we've already introduced the panel so I think we're going to go straight into things um so to start with we have with us of course Alex uh the founder of Chiles which is really reshaping fan engagement in the in the sports sector and pioneering the use of web3 in sports so I guess Alex maybe to get us started can you tell us a little bit about Chili's let's do a little bit of self-promotion uh Chili's is a five-year-old company based in Europe that for the last five years has created the concept of fan tokens I don't know how many uh soccer or football fans are here or UFC or formula one or rugby or Esports or tennis or anything but we've been very lucky to work with more than 100 sports team and properties all over the world and with a very simple and naive idea that 99 of sports fan are not in the stadium not in the city not even in the country of the team they are supporting and so we created these tokens in order to help fans all over the world to have more say to have more recognition towards their team and we've done that using blockchain by creating these tokens on a layer one blockchain called Chili's and by having a consumer facing app that has not 2 million users called socials.com so obviously the big thing really is the fan tokens coming off socio.com we're seeing more and more clubs embracing these fan tokens we're starting to see regulatory Frameworks being introduced we're seeing uh the adoption is really growing in this area can you tell us a little bit more about what these fan tokens are and why they're becoming so popular interestingly actually in the UK in the regulation of the UK in the commission or the Committees Etc fantokens are really part of the regulation framework which is cool and it sees as a they call that investment utility token again is to give a voice it's to give a voice to help fans to become or to come from a passive fund to an active fund and that bridge that we've built is using the token almost like as a loyalty program or a membership program that you as a fan can vote on decision of the club one of the thing we've done for example last week there is one of the biggest Turkish team that asked their fans which number do you want that new player that we've signed to have on his jersey it's a small thing but it's huge so you as a fan anywhere in the world you can be the one who chose not messy not Alessandro but you can choose uh Pepe I think is his name uh Jersey we do a lot of small things like this and we've done that for the last five years successfully and what's really interesting is really the fact that the funds that wants to engage with what we do or the international funds they are not the so-called domestic slash Legacy funds they're already the international fund days and that's where we think as a company we can bring value to both fans and uh and teams and and I think I read somewhere 2022 2023 you had 25 000 holders of fan tokens who got merchandise VIP experiences tickets probably a bit more but definitely the amount of people that got real life or real world here we call that benefits uh yeah it's like 25 30 000 even more yeah for sure so we've talked about football already so I guess we need to introduce Alessandro not that he needs any any introduction but I think um I've heard some some wonderful stories about you and how you were a fan long before you were a player so can you tell us a little bit about what it meant to you being a fan and then becoming a player and how that has shaped your interaction with fans well uh it's uh for me it's quite simple because I leave that experience right but uh yeah of course you start to look at the football career because you have a passion for the game and the passion of the game is moving everything it's for me it was football for for other people's different jobs or different sports or whatever it is Passion drives you to to do more and more and as a football fan you know my experience was completely different that the football fan has now in these days because uh on my time when I was a kid we didn't have a social media we didn't have so much TV so every single inches of that something was right on the newspaper or some few images that you have on TV during the Sunday games that was huge so it was following you I was following every single things about my team and this is how you start to follow football I start to follow football and after that you know more and more and more and and I saw all this transformation now that you know back in time when I started playing football and professional you know people were asking for autograph and then and then phones came out so everybody has a camera now so it's not only not a lot of people asking for autographs to be honest a lot of people asking for a picture and then now with all the technology they're moving forward you know including the one that we are here with Chili's it's bringing you to another brings you to another level and this level is a connection with between fans and football players so when I was a football player I was really taking care of about small things because if you have a chance to spend one more minute with people that you know are here to support uh we're there to support you or to give you some kind of gift I'll ask you for for something something is you know a little one you know it's it's a it's a plus from my point of view it's the exchange of energy is a it's a connection between you and and your fans because at the end of the day you perform on the pitch and we had a big experience with during covet without fans it's not the same thing it's completely different you don't feel even it's real what's happening so I didn't play with our fan to be honest but looking on TV was enough for me and I was speaking with a lot of friends of mine that they were still playing and say well it's I don't know I mean it's good because when you talk on the field you know everything you know you can you can help your teammates but also the opponents here with their saves so it's a without fans it's not the same the same thing so it's a connection between fans and football players in this world is massive and it's very important I I read somewhere that when you were first starting out that you would receive a lot of letters because as you say technology has changed yeah in those days it was letters and that you would respond hand handwritten letters back to the fans that were writing to you so so firstly is that true and secondly do you what do you think would be the equivalent today I guess well yeah I was at the beginning was fun I mean you know you receive a letter from somebody that you didn't even know and tell you a nice story give you compliments this and that so for me and my parents it was a a was it was a big deal so with the help of my father especially and my mother of course but we spent some time to answer every every actually every every single letter that I received because at that time the only way to communicate is by letters so some of them we send back autographs we send picture with autographs so some other stuff and then thanks God because things went in a very good way for me from really at the beginning the number of letters become huge so at that point we did have enough time to do that but we still have I still have a some some some papers where we've signed the name of the people that we reply and the address because we want to reply as much person as possible right but if that person write you three four five times in a month you don't want to I mean it's good that you that's right I suppose to other people right so my father was writing every single I mean I remember people names fans names and that's it's uh I don't think my kids now have three kids they can't even understand that you know because things change a lot but it's a really cool story that I keep in my heart I think you should revisit that list and just pick someone and randomly show up at their house McKelly so McKelly is with Syria so Syria you were the very first League to partner with socials.com so what made you partner with them what were you trying to achieve and and how has that panned out for you yeah James first of all I was wondering I'm the only guy I talk in 2049 with a tie that's her and then you know Italian and everything but the key point is that at the time of Alexandra at the time of a lot of players Syria used to be the best league ever then we had a little bit of issues from 2010 until 2017. last year was a great year we had the inter in the final Champions League Roma in the final of Europa League and Fiorentina in the final of the conference League that put Syria back on the map in the way we want to be but more importantly especially in an event like token 2049 why we are here because football yes talks to 2.

3 billion fans in all over the world but it could be the way to embrace and generate awareness to new technologies as well as what alexander.com are doing so I think there is a role of us right solder clubs leagues to really Embrace what the fans are looking for in order to become as Alex said active fan from passive fund and the only way to do that is to open our mind and really make things happen and not only talk so I don't know if we have a video content that can show exactly what we have been doing in Syria games since January last year so maybe we can show that video of the on the ball yeah that makes sense because the audience can really see what's happening and the real thing is that now in the big games of Syria and even in the back games of the cops the actual ball that scores the goal is collected by the referee goes inside a special box and the fan only the fan who has social.com tokens can have that goal at home so going back to the days of Alessandro I would love to have your goal against Fiorentina man that was amazing but we I really don't know where that ball is today but thanks to the technology now and thanks to token and thanks to the blockchain that certificates that that is the real goal scored in that game from that player that makes sense and that's what funds are looking for from the big games we have a derby next Saturday guys I know that you are all at formula one but there is AC milaninta is a huge game next Saturday and we will do with social.com exactly this so that's interesting because you talked about how it is powered by blockchain and sports memorabilia is a multi-million dollar industry but in Industry where there are a lot of a lot of forgeries out there right so I mean Alex how how is your blockchain based offended education helping to impact that so for those who looked at the video and listened to make Kelly just to make sure every time there is a match right now almost every time there is a match at Syria you as a fan took an older of Inter Milan and similar Juventus or any of the teams we are working with you can now have access to your character you can win because you didn't you don't even have to buy you you can win the original ball that's called the goal that's literally your first thing and we've done that for the first time in Saudi Arabia 18th of January I believe or something like that it was that yeah and it was the first in the world the first time in the world it was really cool and now we we scale that on the ball with um with Syria and if once you receive the ball at home there is a NFC slash nft chip connected to the cheese blockchain you put your phone under on the ball you're gonna see all the metadata that is stored in the blockchain that tells you that that ball was used that day it was scored with this player etc etc and going back to the point Alex the real thing is that we have seen this rise of nfts in the football especially two years ago in the moment of the real boom what we see now is that the fan wants something that is physical something that is real and something that is even certified on the blockchain same as for the good old Panini stickers is where we are going in terms of giving the fund the possibility to be part of the game and and so to complete what we've done with uh with the balls we've uh We've invested in February I believe in a company called match one shirt.com it's a it's a Dutch company and these guys for the last five years they've done that every time there is a Paris Saint-Germain or AC Milan match at the end of the match the players take their Jersey off the company is taking it they are doing an auction on their website but now you're going to be able not only to buy it as a discount or auction it as a discount with your fan token but most importantly once you receive the jersey at home the certificate of 40K the certificate of authentication you get is not anymore a paper that I can forge it's a NFC chip you get on the Jersey when you pet you put your phone on it it goes to the blockchain and it's going to read the metadata of that Jersey so you know that the jersey that you have you put to your friends you show it to your family whatever is the real Jersey that was worn on that match so blockchain is not just about trading and and speculation it's also sometimes about use case that are real and that can be scaled and for chilies as a blockchain uh originally we are the fan token company but now we are going more and more into more use case that are outside just about the ownership of the fan token I I was telling Alex last night every time he plugs match one shirt.

com I get worried because I think I'm currently the biggest user on there and the competition is going to get stiffer if you keep saying this on stage actually yesterday I did I didn't believe him of course at first so I he actually show me on his uh literally hundreds of emails I'm very happy we invested so so Alessandra we we talked about earlier about the Fan Experience right and and the opportunity to get an autograph or to get a picture I mean what would it have meant to you as a fan and what do you think it means to the fans to actually have that ball in their hands and be able to see the goal scored whether it was the the Fiorentina game right 1994 I mean who has that who has that oh that one no no no other ones but okay what do you think it means to a fan to have that opportunity what would it have meant to a young man I mean as a football player I was winning different things I mean and and I'm still going on to keep you know that Jersey or that pair of boots for that specific games I mean I went to the work I'm sorry we were talking about working I know where you're heading but you know that World Cup was a a living you know memorabilia for everybody including both when I score that goal or the Jersey the complete kit or my boots so you hold it you put it away and use a new one because because you want something special you want to keep it safe you want to keep it in a right way or you give it to a special people that you know are close to you so balls jerseys and other kind of stuff like this are very very important as a fan but even as a football player you will stick with that because it's uh represents something for you that maybe a specific games or specific goal represent something special for you that even is not something that people knows because everybody lives his life in a in his way so with the with his balance and other stuff so some things become really really important and you want to keep it and save it and in the screen and in the locker you know yeah so so Alex I mean the the heading of this session here Spotify and the web 3 future fandom so we've talked about on the ball on the moment we've talked about fan tokens which are they're an important part of of the Chili's project but really the evolution of web 3 is gonna is gonna open up a lot a lot more for your company and you've just launched your own blockchain the the Chili's chain and an incubator program can you tell us a little bit more about that and and really what is what is Sport Spotify I guess that's a good question now so yeah for the last five years you know we urge you people know obituaries but they don't really know what we do they know that there are fan tokens which is not a tech but rather a product we realize that we need to Market a little bit more what we're doing and to have a category that Define what we are doing and what we are doing is not just us is other company doing sports uh nfts or Collectibles like a software or data Labs or some other things so we we tried since September now to Market that are on the spot file you have game five D5 art file whatever now you have Spotify we as a company we were the one who brought the the fan tokens fan tokens are great but for now the utility of these fan tokens are limited to the the work that we are doing with the teams we think there is a world where the more we open this ecosystem the more developers are going to develop features for these fan tokens I'll give you an example AC Milan well I'm not sure who is the sponsor of AC Milan as a Emirates but the key foreign you go in a mall here there is a puma shop the idea is eventually I want people to be able to go with their uh Milan token go to location showing with a QR code that is generated every two second Etc uh and you will get a 10 discount at the Puma shop to achieve that ironically the team can almost do nothing Puma has almost do nothing because every country has a different marketing director as a different technology for retail and everything so the more we open our platform the more we open our technology the more we're gonna allow developers startups projects to actually develop features for the fan token holders and that's really what we're going to spend resources and money actually in the next year or so is how do we Embrace and onboard developers to scale that one of the cool things we've announced earlier this year which well we haven't done yet because thank you the bear Market but we're going to create academs in stadium so you're gonna not to have 50 000 people of course but you know to have 100 500 developers in the middle of the stadium or at least having a view in the stadium that's cool that creates a new narrative about how you can Embrace uh and promote webtry um or I will say for us web 2.5 because we're kind of more pragmatic we don't think we're a weapery company we are more like a 2.2 to 2.5 at that point uh but that's okay there is actually Bitcoin can go to zero there will always be sports fan everywhere in the world and there will always be sports team so as long as we continue to develop collectively especially on a chain that is dedicated to that uh we're gonna be fine Michaela it's obviously next for Syria in terms of other use cases how blockchain may evolve how you may approach fan engagement from a tech point of view so James um again the key point is that us is a right solder we need to change the approach so the idea of the balls itself is doing something that was never done before because it actually is stopping the game so you have more 5 to 15 seconds which is the time that it really collects the balls and give the balls back to the delegate that is putting that in the Box for the blockchain the future is that we should be open finally to discuss internally between clubs leagues and federations that we need to give more to the funds and not only wait for money to come from the sky and the as a league and that's area there is Shuffle strategy that we are doing right now goes back to what I was saying before that in the past we were too much focused on the domestic Market looking only at Italy and not looking abroad if we go if we double check the data the recent data that we have is more than 540 million fund of Syrian all over the world that's why Alessandro is so loved when we come here in Asia when we go to the US but Italy is only 33 million funds out of a population of 58 million so what we are doing right now we have an office in New York we have an office in Abu Dhabi we're going to probably open here in Singapore in the next year six months to one year to cover the Asia Pacific but we should find a different angle to speak about Syria and what you are going to see already from the Derby next Saturday is that the brand of Syria will be called Syria made in Italy because the only way to position it Syria and in a different way than the great job the Premier League is doing La Liga or the Bundesliga or the Ligon is the country itself so everything that Syria will do from today onwards will always Stop In Food fashion art everything that differentiates Italy and makes Italy so loved in all over the world and that's where culture can absolutely Embrace this this Vision along with Italian government to really speak about Italy and all over the world thanks to Carlson thanks to Legends like Alessandro that was written our history and especially thanks to the great players that we now retain in Syria because you think that Leo is in a similarities in a summer where we have seen a lot of players going somewhere else the big guys are in our Lake and that's where we should push and work for the better future so so Alex McKelly talked about Asia you talked about Asia earlier I know Europe in Korea recently as well you know obviously Asia is a huge market for sports it's a huge market for Tech so so what role do you think this region will play and how do you how can people whether they're startups investors developers how can they get involved fair enough so emerging markets in general are very supportive of what we are doing actually your first markets from a from a consumer point of view or turkey in Brazil we have like 500 000 users in Turkey 400 000 in Brazil um and Korea and Japan or countries where unlike turkey and Brazil the domestic football is not as big so they rely way more on Premier League Syria and a few other um a few other leagues and therefore their relationship with the teams we the brand that the team represents uh is different and is very powerful we we think that and it's interesting because in Korea we have a lot of Chili's token holders we have a lot of trading volume just to talk a little bit about crypto because we are in the token 2049 something that people don't realize that fan tokens as of today in a bear Market the trading volume of fun tokens is 10 times the volume of nfts today was way more of course uh during the bull market but that's something you need to keep in mind uh 60 100 million a day of fun tokens are traded right now while nfts not Sports entities every nfts it's a 8 to 10 million every day and the reason I'm saying that is because in Japan in Korea where fun tokens are listed for example in Korea there is an appetite to engage with a brand differently the reason five years ago we started what we were doing is I have a five-year-old kid that will never touch cash we'll never buy Exxon stocks it will probably make me broke because of Roblox and the this generation of kids or 15 years old of today they there is a reason that Tesla is the first market cap in the world not because of cars it's because the relationship you have with the brand and with the CEO or the of the owner and so you can expect that in the next 10 to 20 years people will invest not necessarily in a financial way but at least in a commitment in in the way that that's how you Embrace a community a brand Tesla is a community you can expect that in the next 10 20 years people will put money where their mouth is and sports is literally the first category where it happens uh and so the next generation of funds will not buy shares of Manchester United or Juventus you actually can buy if you are Juventus fan today if you can buy shares of Juventus what rights does it give you nothing just voting at the general assembly every year for the for for the accounts if you own a fan token of Juventus today you actually can vote on the music in the stadium vote on the design of the Jersey so things that matters most for you so we think naively that in the next 5 10 15 years money will flow from funds not because they are naive just because they want to support the IP the brand and the community they're a part of so I've got to give the last word to Alessandro here I'm going to ask you because we had owned the ball on the moment we've been talking about these match balls I I want you to give me two balls one a goal scored by you that would be the the best goal you've scored that you want to own the boat the ball for and secondly a goal scored by a different player somewhere in history that you wish that you could own that ball tell us about your favorite goals good one only two only two one for you one for someone else says the guy there's many many goals you know that as I told you before means something the first guy that has scoring professional football was even without wasn't with Juventus was with Padova the first gollywood Juventus when uh when I score the penalties in the final against France so the semi-finals against Germany before was a special ghost in huge tournament uh definitely our goals that have your some of them are beautiful Michaela talk about the one against Fiorentina because that is definitely the most beautiful girl that I ever scored from my point of view but then the other ones that I even not great but means something yeah so and the second part the goals that the board that I want to have are in uh I'm thinking maybe the guys that I was dreaming that I don't even see that much playing like peleo Maradona uh and when one player scored the Thousand goals well that means a lot Maradona 1986 yeah it's the same the same boy you know yeah they didn't come and take it off the pitch there's some iconic score that you know you will never forget um everybody has a different one that's why this idea with Chili's is pretty cool because maybe you got the chance to have that one that you really want so I'm gonna put the last word back to to Alex then well next well after two weeks on the road I'd love to go home uh what's next for us is really about onboarding new um we're gonna have actually new big teams coming and joining the ecosystem we already have 100 plus sports team we launched 85 fan tokens already traded everywhere we are launching a decks in a few weeks but the most important part at least from a sports perspective and a fun perspective is one of the features we want to launch either our socials.com or as developers so if you have any friends companies you know that are developers that are startups project that wants to be onboarded on the cheese chain in order to bring value actually for I'm not going to say for once but to try to bring some real utility in the blockchain space that is not just Financial please reach out to us we have a booth here and I believe Alessandro will be there actually for uh meet and greet at 3 30 or 4 P.

M so please join us there and we'll be able to talk about the cheese chain and all the fun tokens so 4 pm meet and greet level five you can meet Alessandro yeah before we leave James we have three balls which we are going to get Alessandro to to sign for us here okay your chance to own a ball signed by Alessandro make sure we have the insurance guy here they don't kill anyone we're gonna oh you have it this one is better we're gonna shoot as hard as possible okay whoever save it can keep the ball first one all right signed five and now now I can see a little bit of excitement yeah yeah kind of sleep you know well number one I'm gonna I'm gonna add Brides right now otherwise I don't want to keep someone don't hit the roof okay catch oh we have a goalkeeper we have two more two more stand up two more this one on that way that's good I think we found the goalkeeper right there we played five aside in the afternoon guys who wanted to join us last one let me take a picture from here in the back on the left side come on this is unexpected but works that's where it matters you need to really hold it it's like you have a it's like crypto you need to have a diamond hand no paper hand here thank you guys thank you thank you guys thank you thank you