15062026 CHAPEL LEAGUE FUN

The ingredients of a crypto founder. [cheering] [applause] Oh, no. Okay, [laughter] let's switch up the language for a minute. Okay, thank you. Welcome everyone.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for hosting us at Control Shift. Uh my name is Sam. He's Davidid. Uh we have a podcast here in Italy.

It's called uh 2140, which is theoretically the year in which they will mine the last Satoshi for Bitcoin, blah blah blah. We wanted to kind of not have a podcast called Crypto Podcast. You know, it's not that original. So, two white boys with a podcast. Yeah,

two white boys with a podcast, basically. And uh today we're going to be speaking about basically our journey from being people with a podcast to actually being people with a project and what that meant for us. And we don't want to be like the usual founders like the billionaires, the you know tech bros. We we would like to bring a like a project in which real people with real you know adversity etc. built something.

So that's kind of course and everybody knows uh that the the character of a crypto founders uh is very very peculiar. We know uh really influential people uh which took over pretty much the whole internet a few years back in crypto founders and uh surely we don't want to be no names no names no names we don't want to be like that. We try to be different and uh bring uh the content and bring our story what we do ourselves out there in a really different way which is pretty much what we have done until today with 2140 podcast

uh which you know you may call it unusual or [laughter]

for sure

take it over.

Okay. So what we try to do is actually put together like specific ingredients. So what is it that takes someone that simply is in crypto and maybe appreciates the space and makes them into an actual founder? Uh you know like a founder means basically someone that has an idea, executes it and kind of makes something happen which is something that thanks to crypto is basically in reach for everyone. So I think we can talk about the first ingredient as well.

Yeah. Because obviously uh as chefs ourselves we're gonna tell you about the perfect recipe in order to become a crypto founder. Do you want to hear more about that? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. [laughter]

So, as we said before, we're another white boy with a with a podcast. Two white boys. That's us. Totally us. You know the meme.

Uh you're pretty young. If you don't know, don't say it. And we're going to assume that you know it.

Yes. [laughter]

You can go. So we put together four things uh that kind of recap our journey throughout the last I think six years because we've been in crypto since uh late 2019 early 2020 which kind of coincides with the pandemic and the early bull run alcoin season and all these things that kind of put together the space as we know it today. Uh and everyone here is kind of in the process I think of relearning crypto because it's not a an alcoin season space anymore as we can see. It's not a a memecoin space anymore. It's really a a builder first space and I think control shift the hackathons everything kind of uh really makes that apparent.

So the first thing is obviously ambition um not in a Wolf of Wall Street kind of let's make a lot of money and you know forget about everything kind of way.

Yeah, that's for the gurus on Tik Tok and Instagram. Yeah, but more of like an ambition personally about doing something more in a space where sure you can have the average experience, you can kind of go to conferences, you can make some content, you can do whatever, but you really need a driver to kind of want to put yourself and something about yourself there and it lasts. So, uh for us personally, it also started from wanting to have like a footprint that actually stays there and uh that's mainly what ambition was about.

Yeah. And that's also thanks to our media presence that we have built up through the years. So we started at you know investors, individuals, people who uh really wanted to say something about the you know make their voice being heard uh when it comes to crypto market but also financial independence in a certain way more like uh personal finance. Then also we added a few more verticals like geopolitics and uh you know all the stuff you you can think of macroeconomics and you know that helped us uh a lot I would say in getting to know more people and I'm not talking about just the you know the people that follow us pretty much every day that support us but also founders also communities also project and we came up with uh an idea thanks to pretty much every connection we've had And uh our idea was to bring a new type of content on the socials. So the main social that we used at that time was YouTube X and Instagram.

And that's pretty much the same as for now. So we came up with an idea to do something pretty groundbreaking I would say. And uh want to tell the guys what's that?

Yeah, of course. Like the idea uh was something that wasn't born to be a startup, wasn't born to be a project. uh we found that we tried ever since basically 2020 2021 to have an idea that could be a business but I I think that's the wrong way to approach it at least in our experience like uh we actually achieved this thing that's kind of being born and and will probably be something cool hopefully um from basically wanting to do something cool for our socials so we had the ambition to leave something there so with the podcast we have I think three years of episodes which is already super cool uh we had you know the the media presence to kind of talk to people to workshop the idea to and some of them are here as well to kind of give us feedback tell us what sucks what doesn't and also we kind of had this idea to have fun so we gathered up some kos some influencers and we thought what is something that hasn't been done and in Italy as you know like we have this uh fantal show which is obviously very very popular uh and we thought of basically bringing it to crypto to just play on live stream so crypto kos are the coaches uh You choose a token team, you compete in a league and you win a prize. Uh, and we didn't do that to kind of make it become this. We had no idea of what what would come.

But after speaking with people, getting feedback, getting feedback from already like founders, people that represented exchanges, um, we thought, okay, like this can actually be viable and we started from there. But it was basically reverse engineering without even knowing what what we were doing initially.

Totally. And uh let me tell you adversities are literally uh what a crypto founder in our opinion uh needs in order to succeed because you know uh that way you know how to handle things when when they do not go the way you expect them to go and that really really helped us a lot into basically achieving uh what we're telling you today. So let's keep going.

Yeah. As as you can see like a little bit more details here on ambition like we entered crypto together. So, as you can see, we're two bold white guys, and not only we look like kind of this weird uh symbiotic relationship kind of deal because we have the same look. He I'm bolder. He's got more tattoos, but more or less that's the same.

Uh we also entered crypto together because we live like 10 minutes apart from each other. And then we experienced that first bull run, which I I don't know who here, raise your hands, was in crypto in 2020, 2021. Okay. So there's some survivors I think left and it was like a year of entire

you can recognize them are those like without a smile. [laughter]

Yes.

Without any energy left in their eyes.

Yes. So as you can recall probably it was basically a year of madness like 100x on everything 10x alcoin season cardano being listed on Coinbase all these incredible things. And then it just came crashing down. And when it came crashing down, both me and him, we basically lost all of our first leg uh first bull run gains. Uh and we had to start from scratch.

Uh so we found ourselves in this situation in 2022. And in 2022, I think all of us remember a lot of people took a break from crypto because it was like too much. FTX, Luna, it was just getting too much. Bitcoin was at I think 20K, 15K. So that's leaving you.

Yes, that's us in 2022. uh running away from the Quan from Teraluna. [laughter] It's a a real image. Uh so we just thought of doing something that doesn't depend on investment or doesn't depend on money that can always be rebuilt but to do something that actually gives you a purpose and in a moment in which it was really difficult we started Dumachto 2140 and it really gave us an occasion to do two things. The first one was get together as friends twice a week and just laugh.

We just did our live streams. We laughed a lot. We had the best time ever. And also,

and we didn't have much viewers because of that.

Two viewers more or less for about five months. Uh, but we just did it together because it was fun. And this is the first the first episode ever, which as you can see has definitely some problems. Uh, first. So, yes.

Um, I look like a leader of Afghanistan. Uh,

I wasn't even talking to a microphone and we had two viewers. One of them was my iPad.

Yes. So, one viewer really and as you can see like the it it wasn't the best like polished product or whatever. And yeah, [laughter] it was a beautiful logo.

It really wasn't that good. But the cool thing about crypto in Italy is that if you approach something without trying to sell something and shove people's, you know, faces full of a product or whatever just to actually do something cool, they will actually follow you. So slowly but surely it got better and uh yeah uh we we got to actually a place where we were friendly with a lot of business developers, a lot of KLS and thanks to our like I I could say Gen Z DGEN approach as a lot of you probably know we had the chance to actually build human relationships and not like B2B commerce transactional things which is very very important. we really do not resonate with the you know sai hey what you doing today business [laughter]

and that's when we actually had some time to think about the idea because uh both of us are kind of more like driven people we want to do something that actually makes us happy fills up the the hole that we all have inside the existential hole and we went in a lot of different directions like individually so for example I wanted to do something with music tokenization, albums, NFTs, like that kind of tokenization wave, but like it just didn't click with me. I also spoke with some rappers, but like, you know, it wasn't ready for for sure.

And I also tried to find an excuse for my gambling addiction. So, I tried reselling card from Magic the Gather in Pokemon and so on. But, you know, didn't go well. So, we said, you know, let's do something better.

Yeah. Let's let's try and do something together. and we landed on I think it was 2023 an AI marketplace which basically would have matched automatically like buyers and sellers but like concentrated on web 3 but that didn't go well either because it was just probably too early and we didn't really have the competences like we we didn't know what we were doing uh and that's when kind of we also had the four didn't happen so I don't know if you want to start on this

yeah well uh we had quite a few adversities me myself I've been hacked in uh March 2025 uh I was looking for a new job. Then downloaded a file which I thought it was some kind of zoom like software so to have a call but uh the person I was talking to told me that uh we had to use that software because we would have had a uh Japanese professional join joining us in order to review my my position and you know I've downloaded that because I was like uh really hurry

I was missing out I I had fear of missing out so I instantly downloaded that installed. Uh tried to hop on a call which didn't work and ended up uh draining my whole wallet. So uh that was not a beautiful experience. But uh we um uh you know um after two years uh you know back there was one year ago. After two years of having a podcast, having a community and talking pretty much every day with people who support you and find um value in what you said, uh I felt like I had to do something.

So I stood up pretty much all night trying to script a video, editing and recording it the day after and two days uh two days later this accident the video was up and it received a ton of engagement from the whole Italian community. Thanks to all the people who contributed there as a few faces. Thank you Bernardo. Um but you know um it was really really you know a breath of fresh air uh to see how the the community the Italian community um managed to get so uh so close to to something together showing support showing love and we said this is something we really have to to work on. You know the the feeling of having a

something to do together rally around because like I think it helps to put yourself in his position. Like I remember when I got the news, it was like 6:00 p.m. on a on an afternoon, like a random afternoon,

and I was shaking.

Yeah. And it was like uh I just lost everything. Like literally one moment you're good, you're making your plans, you're running your podcast, and then you just lose all the money you have in crypto in like one click. And I thought it would be over. Like to be honest, I thought he would not want to come back to the space because like like you do your first bull run, you make a load of money and then you lose it all because of something.

Then you kind of rebuild everything from scratch. You do your podcast, you're happy, and then you get drained. I really didn't think he he would like have that incentive to get back up. And the day after that, he already posted a video like a storytelling video with chapters, with editing, with everything. And that's when I think everything clicked.

Like I I realized that there's no real like we often think about the the the the phrase like it's not really important what happens to you. Salut bless you. Uh it's more important uh how you re respond, you know, how you react, how you get up, but like sometimes life gives you something that you don't want to get up from. Like it's like count me out and I'll just do something else. But if you just get up and you you get punched and you get up and you you just do that until you're dead, something will happen.

And I think that's the proof. And that's when it clicked that we needed to do something different. And that's when we got like the real idea. Uh because after we did this uh Fanta Crypto initiative, which was basically with influencers like Luca Boyardi or Marco Costansa, Gaudins, who I don't know if he's here, but he's one of the organizers. Uh we had a lot of cool feedback.

We had over I think 1,500 viewers in in a single live stream. That's mostly from the crypto gateway obviously uh to be honest, but we had a lot of a lot of different people coming up and saying, "Yo, I like that. That was cool." And a lot of different sponsors saying that. And when we heard the feedback from the sponsors, the only line was we need a way to like let people play because it's not that fun to kind of just watch someone play a game.

You just want to play yourself. And that's when league.fun fun was born which is basically fantasy sports translated to crypto and the concept we feel like it's it's pretty simple. So basically we saw pump fun, we saw leverage trading, we saw a lot of different things which are very cool instruments but some people in crypto have reached a point after four, five, six years or after getting your first real beatd down as a retail trader that they want to like have fun in crypto, have fun with friends, have some stakes but not like lose everything in one click. Uh so we wanted to do something that doesn't have a rugpull risk, doesn't have a leverage risk, doesn't have a one in a million odds of winning risk and you can do with like moderate sums of money basically.

And also that does not depend on the market condition. Obviously when it's a bull market we would have more users when it's bare market a little bit less but you know you're not uh you're like equally incentivized uh in taking part in those fund even if the market is bullish or either bearish.

Yeah. And you know the the steps are simple. We already talked about that. Uh you join a league, you pick five tokens. One of the tokens is the captain because obviously it's a team and you're the coach.

The captain is worth double either in the red or in the green. And then you just play for the prize pool, which is, you know, if you've ever played a fantasy sport, you just get your friends together. You say, you know, let's do something. Let's uh bet that I know more about this uh Syria or MBA about you and then you. You put together teams.

you get a little money on it because we all like stakes. We all like to compete and win, but you know, you do it for fun. You don't do it to kind of uh change your life in a single bet. You don't do it to put stress on yourself. And that's something that we really struggle with as well.

Because when you're in crypto, you're usually in crypto because you have an internal ambition to kind of either do something for your family or do something for yourself, prove to yourself who you are. And if every time you move something in crypto, you have to kind of prove to yourself that you're worth something as a human, it's just not a functional model, like you will crumble, you will crash and burn. This way, you can just have fun. And that's kind of where we want to, you know, put the focus on without having fun with, you know, rugps like certain platforms. That's basically the the concept.

And we try to model it in this way. So basically instead of having a top three like let's say 1,000 users and just three people take home the pie it doesn't really depend on users like even if there's 10 people there's 100 people there's 10,000 people 30% of the people just walk away with win uh with a win and it can be an incredible win like 10x in a space of three days or it can be a 2x win if you're like the bottom of the pile. Uh and uh you know in upcoming leagues we try to work on that as well uh reaching 50%. So you just need to be in the top half of players and you take home a pretty cool 90% gain.

And this this was will just last one hour. So each hour you have the chance to do so. Yeah.

So uh it's really really uh something that might uh resonate with a lot of people, you know, also that uh game that you play on your phone when you have some spare time. We uh also had a different idea in mind uh at first uh because we want to make the league uh the leagues way longer. So we talked about two weeks, one week, but you know in crypto that's really a a big amount of time.

Yeah. In football it's like okay I can wait the entire city season but in crypto if after like a couple of days you don't have the result you're just not going to be interested. So we we changed that.

Yeah. We have Tik Tok we have Instagram. Our attention span is so little we have to to do something about that. So we decided to to lower it down to three days and one hour for the upcoming leagues and we're going to talk about that soon.

Yeah.

So yeah uh this is one thing that we wanted to focus on. So in crypto we noticed even in ourselves that money and compulsion. So basically the the need to do something the need to prove yourself as a an entire human being the need to do something in a single trade. Um it's it's just basically become synonymous. Like every time someone leverage trades like nine times out of 10 they don't really do that to kind of create a cool little way to earn some more money.

They do it because it's their life on the line and they need to get rich and we really don't want to do that like

yeah we want to build a trusted system where uh we take uh data directly from data providers. So uh there's no liquidity pool involved nothing like that which might get manipulated or attacked. Uh obviously TVL is beautiful things when it comes to crypto products but it's also a risk risk that has to be managed uh the best way possible. We have seen a few attacks now and then uh so we really want to take every measure possible in order to um make our users feel secure in our ecosystem and uh make them also also like forget that they're uh interacting with the blockchain uh through a really super smooth uh experience.

Yeah. And initially like the the amount of money that you can spend on a single league is going to be capped at $100 and you know get down to even $20. So we don't really want people gambling too much. We really want to build something that just is uh like you know the fantasy sports crypto version like something that you can do with your community, something that you can do with your friends, not when you get bored and you just you know like sometimes you just need to play whatever like a steakless game with your community. is just boring, but with something that you can actually put something on the line, but not something that changes your life in the negative.

Like that's not really what we're looking for. Obviously, we're going to take uh a fee on the transactions because otherwise there's no business model. But one thing that we're not going to do at least like in the next I think couple of years until we have like a clear idea is a token because uh you know when you launch a token the token becomes your product and if the token goes bad and 99.99% of tokens in crypto go bad eventually your product will go bad as well. So that's not something that we're interested in and we I don't think it's it's in the in the works for sure.

Of course, of course. You know, um, new products for who's familiar with airdrops and this whole new crypto narrative obviously are a super good marketing tool when it comes to acquiring users, but it's also a double-edged sword because obviously the that gives you some kind of pressure and gives uh a clock to your project. The clock relates to the token, the token uh performance. And if your token performs bad, your project is for everybody.

Yes. Doesn't matter if you're doing the best DeFi stuff out there. Your project is if your token goes bad. So, we really do not need that as of right now. And we're going to consider uh introducing a token if there's there is a real need for that.

Yeah, absolutely. And uh yeah, this is where kind of we're at and we're very very lucky that uh doing the podcast we got to interface and interact with a lot of already like first time founders. They did that already. first- time fundraisers. They did that already.

So, for example, AA, I don't know if you know, maybe we we shouldn't say it in Naples, but uh the organizer of Ethan, Giorgio, uh he's a a friend and he's also an adviser on the project. Uh he has a basically a a cross like per and prediction market platform on Hyperlquid. Uh which is amazing like it's a it's a very very cool app and he's helping us along the way. We also have cyber security partners in hash labs uh who are based in Dubai and based around Italian figures thankfully uh our very own Cobra Lunardo who a lot of people here uh have the chance to know. Uh we also have stable coin on-ramp and offramp partners on the institutional side such as Noah provided by Ya uh and also Hyperoot and Limitless.

Hyperruit is obviously a bit more local project. It's backed by Tomasumaki and Lunardo who are two Italian builders and friends and also we have Limitless which is the biggest prediction market on base. They'll initially be our integration partner and then when we start to introduce another couple of products that we have along the way they will be uh very much interested in in doing that as well. Uh and uh we're pretty much in our invite only launch which means we're not going to open the floodgates. We're just going to have people try the product, test it, tell us what's wrong, tell us what's right, and also gradually scale up towards, you know, 100 users first, then 200, then 300 up to, you know, whatever, wherever it may take us.

Right now, uh, we're going to enter testing phases just in a few days. So stay tuned on our socials. Just you're going to see the call to action to the social and QR code in the last slide. So um we're going to post up uh updates there and uh yeah we're going to start the private beta on board users gather feedback that's going to be a super super important uh phase as we're going to ship the final product through the feedback that our user gives us because obviously league fan has always been living in into our big brains uh big small you decide uh but you know we're going to shape it in a way that really uh matches the people that we're targeting. Also, one last thing on the partners, we have uh the luck and the privilege of working with uh the Solana ecosystem here in Italy and also on the global side.

So, we're very very honored that our you know Solana Italy teammates will probably be involved and you know we'll share some of the feedback that they will give us to make the platform better and uh you know there's probably a lot of exciting things coming on Solana as well. Uh and actually now I think we have the trailer. we have this but uh since we have to move this into a PDF format I don't know if you can see

let's see because uh

otherwise otherwise I will just connect my computer afterwards and do that

because our very own Davidida here uh is not only uh you know a podcaster and a founder he's also an actor now because we made a a pretty cool trailer I have the you know uh very much the luck of having a mother who is um a radio speaker so basically she gave us a hand as well Okay. Uh, and we we filmed something not with AI, not with like the usual animation for meme coins. We really wanted to do something that was real. So, we hired a videographer and we filmed this. But I don't know if we can show this right now.

Uh, so

I'm going to take my computer and do that from there.

Okay. So, in the meantime, we'll just leave the QR code here. Uh, we'll also in the meantime remind you that the Solana track is starting literally in uh, I think 20 minutes. So, there's going to be some pretty cool stuff there. Um, and we have some giveaways to to kind of fulfill for you.

Uh, as you know, there's the side event starting at U 18:30 p.m. 19. And we're going to be going around the event and whoever has the Jupiter Mo mobile app will receive some merch. You can receive uh tickets for the boat party tomorrow here in Naples.

You can receive t a ticket for Breakpoint, which is the premier event in London for Salena. And you can also receive Solana Seeker, which is the Solana phone. Uh, brand new. It's still in the in the case. And, uh, that that's what we're going to give away.

Um, yeah. Let's see if we can share the trailer now so that we can then leave you in peace and we [clears throat] can start the Salana track as well. There it is. Okay. Awesome.

Is that the audio? No, nothing. Technical difficulties. Otherwise, we'll just come round in each and every chair and show you the computer. Yes.

Yeah. Let's try [laughter] [snorts] It's the wrong It's the wrong version of the trailer. [laughter]

Okay. So, this is the wrong version of the trailer. The final one will be on X because there's the voice and there's Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

[laughter]

[applause]

We had to do so much stuff these days. We were running back and forth the whole time because we had to do this something with the crypto gateway uh Salana Italy. So

we were not satisfied with doing everything great. We had to remain like somehow deans and stupid. So we did this. Uh but yes, the trailer will be live. Uh we'll probably be live very very soon.

And uh yeah, feel free to you know follow us, follow the project. And we really really thank you from the bottom of our hearts like for staying here for speaking and listening to us speak and even for staying here with your phone like it's cool like we we know how crypto conferences get. So thank you. Thank you very much and uh we'll update you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you for telling us your story and your project. Okay. Very interesting.

Okay.