Blockchain and the Sports Industry | European Blockchain Convention

foreign [Music] thank you for spending the morning with us he's here he's coming oh we have one more to do list [Applause] so today we'll be talking about sports entertainment and of course this in the context of blockchain Technology my name is Bianca Busa I'm the developer advocate of balancer and founder of devrel uni and I have with me some very interesting panelists let's give them a round of applause and I would like to start by giving them the chance to introduce themselves to Adora would you like to start uh yeah sure happy too so my name is Theodora I'm a VP of Business Development and ecosystem Partnerships at Dapper Labs I started at upper Labs about six months ago looking after football Partnerships and I've transitioned recently my role into building out sort of our ecosystem Partnerships um and just any new business development we do at the company I before Dapper Labs I was at Google for 12 years and I at Google I said across many many content companies Sports rights holders gaming companies broadcasters you know across the board and I could see how the web 2 kind of ecosystem and environment just really was not providing meaningful commercial opportunities for content eyepiece and that's a huge reason of why I wanted to start the web 3 Journey with upper Labs is because you know the realization that there's something in web 2 that is just not working the way it should be and it it's it's prone for disruption so I am really happy to be here thanks to Dua hello everyone I'm Jean Charles can call me JC and actually that's what happens when you work almost 20 years at EA which is where I come from so my background is mostly uh gaming FIFA I worked for 15 years on on the FIFA game my bonus was mostly made by you or your kids spending money in FIFA Ultimate Team thanks for that but basically with football um crypto and gaming becoming CEO of one football Labs was a no-brainer for me in order to really push and bring that gaming experience over to to web3 but coming in also extremely humble because there's a lot I need to understand in defy and in-game file in order to make the the the immersive and gaming experiences that I think this ecosystem needs or that you know players in this world needs whether they know it or not today so thank you for having me hello everyone first of all I'm probably one of the ones they they bought a lot of Ultimate Team packages my name is Pablo Monty I work as brand ambassador at bingx I'm from Argentina so I won't talk about the workup because French people and thank you everyone please please do us that's the last thing I will say and my background is I work for 15 years at the major sports TV channel in Argentina then as a Content kind of content then we started to work with the gaming and Esports and we created a nice internal business inside there and I moved to Valencia two years ago and I was working for a Esports Club then I joined uh web3 platform that linked Esports with with three through memberships and things that we probably will tell later and now I'm working at bingxas brand ambassador more in charge of the APR comes and marketing side so happy to be here hi I'm Alex refuse the CEO of chilies and socials.com we are the company that was created five years ago that tokenized sports team what does it mean it means that we are creating fun tokens which are fungible digital assets for almost 100 teams all over the world including Barcelona Valencia Paris Saint-Germain Juventus Arsenal Man City etc etc and with a very simple and naive Vision 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 therefore the question for us was what can we create that is that both add value for the team um or both that is scalable for a team and has value for for fun and we created this concept of fun token it worked decently well for the last four or five years we have two million users and we are 300 employees all over the world and we also even though France lost the World Cup we actually use Council of Argentina and Messi so I'm okay with it hearing their backgrounds I think we're gonna expect a spicy conversation probably you agree with me I would like now uh to invite you to address the elephant in the room what's the current state of the ecosystem when it comes to sports and entertainment in blockchain I will start actually um because you talk about an elephant in the room um I think there is technology is available as we know there are different companies like ours and most of us here on the on the panel that provide services the main question is when will we fit to the market is there a market when that market will be uh strong enough to sustain all this investment that are being made and that gonna continue to be made I think what's interesting in crypto is the the pace of the industry everything goes super fast up but it goes as fast down and we all suffered either financially or as an industry stakeholder of the FTX drama last year I'll talk about us from socials.com perspective we were not exposed obviously to FTX but it does damage significantly the image of crypto and blockchain in the sports industry and it is an issue because collectively here year we are companies that are trying to provide mainstream products that are branded a little bit crypto and blockchain in many ways and therefore it's way more difficult today than it was two years ago when everything was super easy and super hyped um it is more difficult today to get an audience I'm pretty sure there were more people actually in the in the conference before which was about defy then they will be right now about sports yet Sports is a much bigger industry ish than than the crypto D5 for sure and so we we are as mainstream related product I think we are tainted by all the bad news that happened for the last 12 months in that space and and in a way it's great you know what it's healthy all the things are being cleared cleaned but it's also painful because we have to fight twice more we have to fight to get the right product do we have it or not and then we also have to fight from a regulatory perspective and from a PR perspective and that's a lot of work um so yeah that's how I will start so so I think from a double lapse perspective I tell you where we are today is an incredibly important year and in some ways an even more exciting year and I'll explain why 21 was kind of the year when just there was a moment sort of in time where the web 3 Community the crypto native Community kind of saw a product as with NBA Top Shot that they've never seen before and obviously that attracted all the the tension that it attracted and all of a sudden within a span of 12 months or so you you saw kind of a product to reach over a billion in cells that amount of growth requires an incredibly difficult and sort of like accelerated Rush towards supporting this type of growth and supporting this type of product um but where we are today is a way from sort of the hype of the growth and more into the stages of really really trying to dig deep and understand how will a mainstream audience find Value in this new technology and it's nft is not a market nfts are not an industry it's an underlining technology that has the potential to really transform how fans engage with what they love but also how Sports IP properties generates commercial value online and today you know Sports IP rights holders compared to the money they can generate with their media rights and sponsorship Etc compared to what they generate through their online audiences it's it you can't even compare which is crazy to think about it you know a big football club like a Liverpool that's got over a billion of fans around the world it's incredibly powerful enormous IP that simply doesn't know how to monetize its IP online because of the structures of the web too so where we are today at Apple Labs is very much trying to be creative and think of how we are going to crack these mainstream use cases where we we provide value to the mainstream audiences and for sure it's a long journey for sure it will be trials and error but where the industry is today is providing that sort of focus and strategy which is the only way I think this industry will will have will fulfill its potential to change the internet nothing to Adam no um I think you both said the same thing I think or or I completely agree with what you just said that one football Labs is in the exact same situation I think it's a matter of mass adoption I think that's the next one we need to crack and a difficult one personally that's why I joined and that's why I'm and I were leading one football Labs because I think that Sports um and gaming for that matter or immersive uh experiences around uh around that is the way for Mass adoption and today I think that we we haven't we barely scratched the surface that didn't happen yet I think what's happening in D5 World indeed is is is a bit difficult and I think the beauty in the D5 world is that it doesn't need as much the end consumer as much as we do today so it's interesting because we're getting into a bit of a new era or when it comes to you know the end consumer and and mass adoption and and to be honest today we're light years away from being able to get there even though people make you know Wonderful presentations to raise money on whatever else if you look at the amount of words take words technology like things that need to be explained to the end consumer for them to to not be skeptical about getting in there there's massive work that is needed here right when you see the steps in the friction for someone to get into any type of web3 experiences um crypto experiences for that matter um there's a lot of work to be done there and that's what we're focusing on a lot at the moment and we're going through you know trial and errors but again if you look at the friction of just getting into any of the marketplaces to buying anything Etc nfts collection dvms Dapper and we both do digital video moments we own Seria Bundesliga any any other Alpha actually also pretty happy about Argentina we had actually the sandbox experience on Argentina at that time so that was one way to not cry all my tears out but but yeah that's really the important piece here and I think we need to all to reflect on that uh um at least I'm trying to Advocate now more and more and say let's please stop with with you know uh or all the terms we're using we're using which internally makes sense but honestly we haven't talked to anyone outside that understand and when we're trying because we're at the Forefront of talking to clubs to players to right now skepticism is through the roof and not just the FTX right it's easy and it's not the escape goat so okay that the whole thing should shake up the ecosystem I agree but just even day to day just if you look at a pitch today from a game from you know um uh or any other stuff and you look at the deck and please ask yourself the question and say don't understand don't understand don't understand and if I don't how come anyone as an end consumer can understand getting get into this so to me that's an important one to crack um I want to pick what you said about friction and and I believe probably gaming and Esports can set the base because we are talking about current and more important future audience for for what it's traditional Sports And so there's there's something that we can take from there even though as you said the the septic system in in Esports is growing also people is not liking many of the ventures that that we see around and about the question from being excited I've been a crypto change I believe that crypto exchange need to figure out what's the next step until now we see only sponsorships and then sponsorships and sponsorships and being part of the blockchain world I believe we all need to figure out how to start relating and with the sports and entertainment and Esports in a different way not just put in money and and getting some value for for sure but understanding that this is an uh a disruptive technology and we need to be also disruptive and probably we are the more conservative within the space in terms of how we relate with the sports and entertainment if you sorry about thinking of that if that's okay I'll speak for the next 24 minutes anyway um the the um the Esports thing is very interesting why because Esports actually created play to learn before it existed created play to own or play and own which is also a little bit of a you know a trend right now around gaming and again immersive experiences um that's super interesting I think that's a trend we need to stay really close to because again in Esports there was already the premise of you know playing a game and actually commercially leaving from it and that's the super interesting piece today whether it's you know on the on on the games we build on the products we build I keep saying games but I want to say immersive experiences metaverse you name it but kind of a an end user or an end consumer experience entertainment experience um that that's going to be extremely interesting because we know now that we're solving a problem from the end user and as you all know a product wins when it's actually solving a problem and in that case this is exactly what's happening there where there are people out there and if you play any MMOs go into the World of Warcraft of the world some of you probably lost your life and money in there don't like even if you're 50 years old I know you played it so don't don't try to look away but the point is you've got an ecosystem of players that have time but no money and then you got now people that are 40 40 plus 35 plus 30 plus years old people that spend money straight into the game and they don't have games and they don't have games to spend that money exactly and today and actually no in the ecosystem doesn't exist and that's what you mean so what they do is they go through companies that farm for them and the whole farming thing Etc web3 solves that problem it very much solves that problem so these are the interesting like the the dilemmas for users and the way they want to play games and I'm coming from EA and we had tons of discussions internally but the big gaming actors today can't go into it uh or they there's a feeling of betrayal for the current community so they're stuck we need to meet them on the other end of of that of that tunnel about uh I think there is a difference between gaming and Esports uh as gaming being the product Oh you want to go there yeah okay good there okay yeah uh no no but just because I think I do think that blockchain does I think is relevant in gaming I'm not sure it is in Esports uh and I say that because we've been working with uh seven of the biggest Esports team in the world for the last few years and and from a final engagement perspective not from the game exactly that's why yeah uh from from the final engagement perspective Esports fan or not Spenders because actually they are young um and they are very distributed globally already but they don't need the same interaction that a football fan of barca in Japan in Korea in turkey and Brazil wants to have with and in our case we work with 100 plus Sports property we have 88 I think football teams uh seven Esports team and um and Esports don't really works with us we don't have the right product to be fair but still we can see that the pattern that what we do is way more relevant in traditional quote-unquote Sports than digital Sports and you're right because one thing though is Esports what I meant was the basis of Esports shows that there's a need for you know what web3 brings being able to own stuff being able to get remunerated no that's that's a with a French accent that doesn't work get paid uh for for the work they do right but you're right because these spots remain Niche and Elite it's it's the Olympics of gaming so you can't say this is mass adoption or something but what I meant was the structure shows that there's a path towards being towards what web3 can offer which is people playing and a lot of the games you see today come starts off chain as a good game as a good experience as a good immersive experience then they turn on chain at the right time because then for people you know interested like oh wait so I and then I can you know whether it's through an auction house through trading through whatever through farming or grinding then I can get money from that so that actually gives a second life even pun intended I guess a second life to to uh to you know to these products that that's um Esports JC I have a follow-up question you mean uh you said earlier to enhance their experience so now whether that's Esports gaming or regular Sports how do you feel that uh we can enhance The Fan Experience me any of you yeah because he's going to jump on it because that's his job is to enhance The Fan Experience no no it's very important because today if you if you and it's really good question because today if you look at the football ecosystem it's by far the most fragmented one as a spawn right it's completely fragmented um it's actually but not in a decentralized way I'm not a good decentralized day in a bunch of centralized Islands from federations and clubs and teams and stuff and and even player agents or federations that make it incredibly hard for us to navigate um that's one but more importantly it makes it completely impossible for a football fan to navigate because in some ways what's really interesting is and that's I think what and I'm not here to talk about socios but we have a lot in common on that phone this is where I think what what we want to do here among anything else is in the current football World the fun is being left behind in that industry where today clubs Etc makes a ton of money and I support PSG by the way don't boo please do not boo but you know born and raised in Paris and the last PSG against Bayern the last Banner that you had in Pak de France in the stadium is we're not Neymar we don't have enough money to go to your Stadium two days ago three days ago Champions League game this is a reality and this is completely [Music] excuse my French but like in in honestly like this is a problem and 99 of people cannot go to cannot go to to a stadium could not enjoy the stars of football today are completely impossible to approach or unless if you run naked in a you know on a page trying to hug him and get security to throw you out we need to help we need to find experiences again so people and on FIFA to a certain extent that's what I've done for 15 years trying to give football you know but that's just a that's that's that that's that's a tiny a baby step towards what actually web3 can do which is make the the user an actor in the football world so I think to me this is key so how user experiences a fine engagement experiences can be enhanced in web 3 sort of in my mind it comes down to the fact that there is ownership web3 allows for ownership and webpray also creates sort of a primary and a secondary markets none of these things exist in a web 2 world and so through ownership you can you know basically express your fandom for the lack of better phrase but the more you own the more you collect which is sort of where Dapper lapse is is trying to so we use case for is the more you are a fan and if a club or a league it recognizes your fandom because they can see now they can see you or The Collector who is the most passionate about a certain thing then sort of those experiences can now become make you eligible for a lot more rewards and personal meeting rates and so on and so forth so we at adapter Labs we start with sort of the collectible experience you know in the World of Sports and in football in particular collecting trading cards Etc like that panini sticker albums that that feels like a very uh natural Fan Experience right and in the physical world how can we take something that we know is real in the physical world and now transport it into the digital world and so that's sort of our mentality and mindset is creating these collectible experiences but because it's web3 and because this technology allows for a lot more recognizing you as a fan what does that mean for you you've collected all of these moments and you've done this collection and now so what what are the rewards that you're going to receive for your loyalty and for your fandom and I think that's where it becomes particularly interesting so jumping in um so funny enough our baseline is Be more than a fun the first question we should ask is what is a fun in 2023 actually it's a very broad question it's not the topic of the panel today anyway but there is no such a thing of a fan there is a multiple amount of tribes that have a different engagement with the brand the community the sports property they want to engage with either you're based in Brazil in Japan Korea or in Spain if you're a fan of basa you're gonna engage with the the brand completely differently and so in our case uh you know we are called socials.com uh it actually came from here well it's from barca in Real Madrid but it can from here where here in Barcelona you have a club that is not on uh by private entities but owned by 137 000 socials were members of this club that's great but it's 137 000 people out of for 100 million fans or 500 million fans depends which deck you're gonna read um now the question is what can you create to both engage and monetize this fund and don't take me wrong monetizing fun is not a bad thing it means that you bring value to them in exchange of a fee and what we created five years ago um and hopefully we continue to to roll out feature and services is giving a new way for a fun somewhere in the world where it can have a relationship with that team there is more funds in China of Barcelona than in Spain and yet what can a Chinese fan do with Barcelona more or less nothing most of the Jersey is going to buy or fake so it doesn't bring any Revenue anyway to the club it's still a fun so what can you give you can have weibo the equivalent of Twitter but that's a one-way relationship me as a fan I'm not recognized so the advantage actually of the blockchain uh in in that case is two things we give you ownership of a membership we call that fan token and there is scarcity and because there is ownership and scarcity it has value there is a limited amount of that thing and because there is a lived method amount there is value and now you are suddenly a fan that has a vested interest there is this English expression which is you put your money where your mouth is at the end final engagement is that you put your money you put your time on something you like can be a video game can be a sport property football club whatever but the thing is if suddenly you have money in the game either as a collectible either as a fan token or many other features where we can all invent that matters because I'm part of it and we we are just trying in our case we're just trying to help and help sanskoki but we to support Sports property to try to really capture a new Revenue stream that they are not able to do on their own because they don't have the ability to scale it you know you cannot ask most of the sports team to have 13 languages to have payments compliance regulatory product investment the only purpose of a football club is to play football so you need actually third-party companies to invest and we collectively here invest quite a lot in order to try to develop features they don't always work but at least we are trying and we can scale them collectively as a network effect and the reason I talk about our Network effect is because one thing that is usually understated is a fan is not a fan of one team and one sport not anymore if you live in Barca sure you're a Barca fan but when you live in Korea you like Barcelona Paris saint-germa you like a bit Man City you are Arsenal and you like as well Formula One and UFC so the more you can aggregate this IP the more you can aggregate this brand on the same platform the same blockchain the same ecosystem don't more you can actually increase the revenue per IP per teams and the more you can bring value to the funds as well we're actually starting to do cross-selling or cross activation between some NBA teams and European soccer teams football teams and that's interesting so the the the growth of football let's talk about football is international but this International growth I believe is going to be mainly driven by Tech innovation I like this question because they are responsible for solving this not me but what I feel is in traditional Sports historically the best fun loyalty and that you have is as you mentioned the word experience I mean the experience the people attending the stadium Hospitality if they can afford it or they got the ticket and whatever but what I believe it needs to be solved is how we deliver that experience outside the stadium you know and how for example what you said one guy in Korea how it we create such an experience as being in the stadium for that person I mean web3 has that potential through metaverse through memberships you you will develop that not me but um for sure I believe that's the next step how we bring that experience that fun loyalty that taking care of the fun outside the study you use the m word from metaverse so do your point yeah yeah I will um experience is the is the key but the problem is the experience is not scalable I'll give you an example at socials we are giving away this year 17 000 VIP tickets uh all over the world seventeen thousand we actually have a dedicated team that is focused on that um but again in Camp new here you have 99 000 seats I believe uh and there is a demand for I don't know hundreds of thousand for a few mattress probably uh so you you do need and I don't have the answer to that but you do need to build new new experiences is it metaverse I don't know what is a metaverse anyway uh but definitely there are digital initiative that needs to be scaled to actually allow users to feel part of it and I don't have the answer to that to ask a follow-up questions you said different initiatives so what do you hope will be achieved sooner rather than later when it comes to sports and entertainment related to web free how can we enhance these experiences so actually that's great if I may I just want to say something and then it will be linked to that but I think what we're discussing here also is we need to move that's very important to me from collect to utility because a lot of what's coming back from what we're all saying here is utility I think I've seen a lot of experiences the M world or others which whether or built on fomo on speculation on an investment a lot of the success when I came in and I'm like damn these guys did a lot of money then I looked at it they had an experience and I tried to understand where the money was coming from it's not in consumer either it's just the investment and these guys didn't need really to think utility for the end user this is extremely important or not actually it's a make or break on utilities that we can bring since we're in the in a very similar world this weekend we're bringing 10 people to VIP you know in Syria to VIP treatment in AC Milan Stadium Etc et cetera so same idea why because we think that these people will never be able to go there and when I meet actually clubs and you know I say please stop inviting your friends over to your VIP rooms and start inviting fans stop inviting people to make deals with suits at the top of the VIP rooms in the stadium bring fans that actually have their shirt of your team I think it's part of exactly what trying to do this is utility um just to stop the the question you asked is which use cases will become adopted or developed earlier than others I think the way I'd look at that answer that question is I actually believe that it's in the hands of the innovators and the Developers that will come up with use cases that big companies will struggle to come up with and this is where I do want to talk a bit about composability in web3 because it's web3 it's not web 2 what's different about web3 the fact that in web3 any application is in its own right and API and you can build on top of this application and you can add layers and layers and layers of utility use cases innovation ideas like that is an exponential power to drive Innovation and come up with the use cases that will hit the hearts of the fans so um for sure sort of this idea of like I've spent my money on my fan tokens and what am I getting in return and perhaps you have a fairly clear answer to that but like I'm doing collecting sort of my digital moments from all these football properties what is it that I get in return and we are all coming up with ideas and experimentations but you know there we're still not at a stage where you can lay out a membership program that is clear-cut to the users from the early days of that collection and we're all working towards that but as as much as we will continue to try to figure it out and test a few things I I strongly believe like as the internet the 20 years of history and the internet has really shown us it's these developers the innovators sitting somewhere in a room with just a lot of ideas that web3 allows them to to actually make them happen to build so in the upper Labs one of the things we're really interested in looking into today is how we start to create composability on our Sports properties that have already received adoption and sort of that sort of where we are looking at one thing I realized actually is I need to drop the name of my company a lot more in these uh I'm like I'm gonna I'm gonna use um so just because we have almost left in a minute but yeah I think technology is about enhancing to the point of Bianca on this it's it's about bringing new usage rather than to replace something that exists uh in sports you know people who go to a stadium uh tickets it works you know you go you will get your tickets it works do you need to do uh to have a nft probably for security reason but yet you're solving a problem but you're not increasing neither the margin uh or you're not increasing the number of people who's gonna have access to that so I think technology in our case is going to be about bringing these Brands outside of their comfort zone or see outside of the stadium um and to the point of web 3 I'm not ashamed especially because I've been in the Internet space since 1996 so it's a long time ago um to say that we are more a web 2.5 uh company than a web 3.

0 yet having said so um we've announced actually last week that we're launching on your chain blah blah blah I'm not gonna pitch it but the point is yes there will be more and more developers startups initiative that's going to be able to use fan tokens till now we were the main utility provider we were the exclusivity provider of the fund tokens that's great that's how we started and that's how we grew but now we're gonna give access to anyone in the room if they want to develop and provide value that if you own a Barca token and you are a startup and you're gonna build a platform where I can go to the McDonald or somewhere else and I get 10 discount because I own that fund token that makes sense it doesn't mean that we as a company we have to develop it but we're going to give access to the tools for anyone to launch these kind of things but and it's a big but in sports there is an IP player here that is the that is an issue you are working with brands that are 100 years old you cannot play the same then board apes or any other crypto traditional Brands and that's one one of the things people forget I cannot launch anything I want with the brand boxer because I have a Barcelona token or because I can offer a service on top of it and that's the limitation of the web 3 in sports that's a very good point short since time's up and and you said what I was going to say and that that's always tough uh big X my brand so and no no I believe the next thing is still to come and probably they need to seduce two heads the user and the authorities or the responsibles of the eyepiece and as you said invite is a fans to the to the office Hospitality not brands or not so your partners and when once we get something that people understand is useful and you are allowed to do what you want to do from the responsibles of the IPS maybe we can we can get that next big thing the fun is the glue in that ecosystem not anyone else but in the football ecosystem the fine is the glue if we bring utility to that fund actually we even have a chance web3 can actually play a massive role into for football specifically actually bring all these actors much closer to each other one football labs unfortunately times is up so before we get kicked out I would like to invite you all to give a big round of applause to our panelists [Applause]