Christian Hentschel on TradeStars, fantasy sports with blockchain

0:22you know what exactly is the focus of trade stars and the vision and mission of your project yeah sure i mean we want to create the nasdaq of fancy stocks leveraging the blockchain technology so it's a huge mission we have there's a tremendous opportunity to do this using the blockchain technology and this we started with the sports industry fantasy stocks on sports

0:47industry because of my background in fantasy sports and also in blockchain gaming we decided that would be the first vertical we would yeah it's really exciting because fantasy sports and trading is has been around for a long time but now you're revolutionizing it adding in newer technologies now can you talk about how does trade stars change how fantasy

1:14sports has worked before and now how it will work in the future sure photo sports it's been around for a while as you said daily funded sports is been around for the last 10 years i think leverage on the race of the smartphone since 2009 2010 and one of the most famous companies is draftkings for example i find that there's a lot of room for

1:44improvement in that model actually there are a few companies in the uk that's one of the crowded markets for sports betting and gambling and that and we started to see a shift in the daily fantasy model according to the real-time behavior of the new users the mobile users according to these times so we started thinking about building a fantasy stock exchange for

2:12Sports where people could go to a market and buy and sell shares of their favorite players that fluctuate the value based on the real life performance of the player instead of building a team and competing against each other for a price that's the idea of what we want to innovate on the fun support space and by doing this on the blockchain allows us to

2:37do some really great stuff and i think it gives us a strategic advantage over the traditional companies because for example we can have an open seven by 24 hours market because the people interact with the smart contracts and we don't have holding of their money or we don't need if the users buy we don't need a seller to execute the order just they play

3:03against the smart contract so it provides a increased level of transparency of transparency and security also and allows us to do a virtually borderless game also so i think there are a few things that we are innovating definitely and that's exciting to be able to trade anytime you want and not have those counterparties to verify if you're just interacting with smart

3:27contracts now i was looking into trade stars and right now you're heading towards the early access of the program how long have you been working on tradestars for and when is the early access available and the main launch of the platform well we've been working for the last few years actually we started the product the idea with the idea two years ago

3:51but we released the first version of the product in january and we registered about 30 000 users but then the copy came in april in mid april so sports stopped and we decided then to reach out to start reaching out to esports or verticals to see if we needed to change the model a little bit or i mean a pivot you know because we didn't know at that

4:17moment if the sports were about to come back in three months six months next year so but when we then the sports came back in september so we resume full speed what we were doing in april and we are releasing our version two so we have now a preregister list for the users that want to register on the platform play and the version 2

4:45is about to be released in a few days very exciting and your ideal customers right now you know integrating smart contracts and blockchain some people that aren't involved in that industry may see those as technical barriers and make it a little bit more confusing do you do you see the majority of people that are using the platform right now are already familiar with blockchain or

5:10they've been in fantasy sports before and do you plan on targeting people that are outside of the blockchain industry yeah we're planning to target the sports fans and the gamers which is a more broader scope than the blockchain users or cluster of users right now so this is this one one of the main focus that we have since we started because obviously also because of my background

5:34in our fund sports before and in blockchain gaming so you see that the technology still has some barriers for the massive audience to play and we are making a lot of effort to hide the technological layers and to allow everyone to register with an email and just play you know and we did many a lot of work there actually and i want to touch a little bit more on

6:02the blockchain because you're utilizing smart contracts on ethereum which is a great platform but you're also working with the matic network which is a layer two solution can you talk can you talk about the technology stack that you've chosen why you've chosen that and what are the benefits for tradestars yeah sure sure and this is connected with the previous question because

6:22in order to have a massive product obviously we can't do that in ethereum right now because if we want to have a real-time stock exchange we need a real-time transactions and we don't have that in ethereum and also the transaction costs it's very pricey so we decided to integrate with matic which is a layer 2 scalability solution for ethereums at sidechain

6:44where we execute all the transactions of the game while the users deposit and withdraws money from the main chain which is ethereum and that's the only transaction that we have on the main net the deposits and withdrawals because obviously most of the liquidity is right now on ethereum but once we switch that deposit into matic the users play and the timing of the transactions

7:12goes from 20 seconds to two seconds and wow he also allows us to implement meta transactions which the company pays for the fees of the transaction so the users don't need to have the currency of the blockchain to make transactions it's very easy because you're registered with your email you just deposit as if you were depositing on draftings

7:36for example and then you can play without thinking about having crypto for paying transactions fees and seems very smooth so this is one of the main things that we work very hard on yeah i was just going to ask you that christian about the users on the platform they can pay with their credit cards but can they also use cryptocurrencies and is there a native

8:02cryptocurrency built into the platform yes both obviously we have both methods fiat payments directly with credit cards and or transfers and crypto payments with ethereum or any erc20 coin supported now we are supporting eight but we can add more coins we are supporting just a few because we are doing also marketing marketing actions with those companies

8:31but yes both both type of withdrawals and deposits would be available and yes and we have a native coin which is the governance token for the company which plays a really important role in the economy of the system because the user when the users buy shares of their players they will start perceiving dividends based on their real players performance

8:56in real life and those students get paid on the company's coin which is okay that's really interesting and i was looking into you know the technical details of having players and you're somehow tying in non-fungible tokens nfts into the platform can you explain how that works and what are the benefits of having non-fungible tokens sure we are we are doing

9:25fractional non-functional tokens which is a new thing and what we are doing is with the nft or non-functional tokens we are tokenizing we are representing the real life statistics which strike we track of football players for example we track 30 variables per player per game so this unique thing is tokenized into an entity then the enemy is fractionalized on the

9:50platform and users can buy and sell shares of that nft and by buying or selling shares by having a portfolio of shares the shares will the shares price is influenced by the real life performance tokenize on dnc so they will start receiving dividends on the main platform token on all based on that i mean we are like gamifying the fight let's say

10:15because it's similar to when you go to unit swap or balancer for example platforms where you very defy platforms not sports or fantasy stocks related but users deposit money and they are start getting dividends in the main platform coin so it's very similar but apply to transistors it's a really interesting twist and with tradestars 2.0 your new release you

10:39vow to bring more decentralized finance functionality into these nfts and i'm guessing you know owning the nft really you are in control of that yourself you have the ability to as you said earn dividends sort of like earning interest on your assets but you also have the ability to buy and sell at free will is that really the main point of the decentralized financial functions of

11:05owning these trade stars nfts yeah there are some economic incentives built right into the game similar to what it's going on the five platforms you can buy and sell stocks of your favorite players you will start receiving dividends by i mean influenced by the real players performance in real life and also you can stake

11:31that token of the company to unlock new markets new markets we call new markets the new players let's say so there's an incentive for you to go and buy shares to get dividends shares that performs better than the others you know to get dividends to get those tokens take those tokens to open new markets and there's another incentive here

11:53built right into the fractionalization of the these which is the very first stocks as it follows abundant curve it's not a linear price you know the first stocks are the cheapest one so there's an incentive for you to go early to the market to spot those players that will have the most upside you know to get more dividends to you know to get the

12:17The incentives chain going on let's say and so that's that's basically the game i mean it's a crypto economic game but based on i mean influenced by the sports in this case that's really cool and now you've start you launched at the beginning of this year and there's it's been a bumpy ride with sports being canceled and now they're back

12:42and i know you guys have so much more to grow with the platform can you give a hint into what do you have in store for 2021 as you continue to grow and expand tradestars yes right now we decided to launch with cricket and we registered 30 000 users when we launched it was really good really good based on that metrics that we have we are seeing we have a plan of reaching

13:10out reaching to a million users by august next year and also in the for the next few months we are going to have more sports next on the line is soccer football for us and we are also because of the sports that got cancelled we start reaching out to esports teams and also other verticals like for example celebrities and influencers and we are preparing other things to

13:38to add to the main platform but basically we are focusing now on cricket then soccer maybe esports later but the plan is to get to a million users by august 2021. wow well there's definitely millions and millions of people that are watching those sports so i could definitely see how you could get there and now i have we're running out of time christian but i have one last question

14:04what do you think will be one of the main key factors to the success long term of trade stars oh really an interesting question i think would be the easy the main challenge is to make a really easy game for users i mean they're the sports are one of the biggest passion worldwide you know and the biggest economy also

14:32you know factors let's say influencers and so we i think that we should make the game as easy as possible because the people that are looking for these type of games already there i mean you can compare to establish platforms like draftkings for example fanduel or platforms in the uk so there's really no similar platform to this in blockchain

14:56so i think we have a tremendous opportunity to do a really good thing here for a massive for a massive audience right not just the crypto users so i think that the most important fact important factor for us is to create a really smooth experience on using this product i think well said and if the viewers are looking to start using tradestars follow along as

15:23you continue to add more sports and get involved with the communities what's the best way for them to learn more well you can go to tracearts.app which is the site and also there's a whitepaper for more power users that say you wanted to want to understand how it's built and what we are doing but you can go to https tradestars.app and then you can you have

15:46all the links for getting information also we have a telegram channel which is tradestars okay and twitter tracer's okay also and facebook twitter's okay we have 45 000 users in on the in the community we usually communicate on in telegram and twitter so yeah you can follow us there great well i will leave those links in the description box below

16:10thanks so much for the time christian all the best with tradestars moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thanks to you ashton thank you for having me here bye you